TransArts: Kurt Hentschläger

Splendid Void / Rendered Real

Work notes of an experimental artist.
Sensory overload, the zombie apocalypse and need for baking.
New York based Austrian artist Kurt Hentschläger creates immersive, audiovisual installations and performances.

Between 1992 and 2003 he worked collaboratively within the artist duo „Granular-Synthesis”. Hentschläger’s works have characteristically been visceral and immersive, as in ZEE and FEED, with extreme perceptual effects, composed from light, sound and fog. These works physiologically affect the viewer’s experience. His real-time generated CLUSTER series builds on the uncanny, by portraying 3D representations of humanoid creatures that can only exist in dynamic flux, seeming to swirl and flow like the wind, apparently unhinged from the screen. His most recent body of cinematic work including MEASURE and ORT is tracing the concept- and appropriation of nature in the Anthropocene.

Most recently, in 2017, he premiered SOL, an immersive audiovisual installation in total darkness at Halle Berghain, Berlin and ORT, a public project, a 360 projection onto Oscar Niemeyer’s “Le Volcan” building in the center of Le Havre, France.

Selected presentations include the Venice Biennial, the Venice Theater Biennial, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, PS1 New York, FuturePerfekt New York, MAC - Musée d’Art Contemporain Montreal, MAK – Museum of Applied Arts Vienna, National Art, ZKM – Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Museum of China Beijing, National Museum for Contemporary Art Seoul, ICC Tokyo, Arte Alameda Mexico City, MONA – Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, Sharjah Art, UAE and the
Power Station of Art, Shanghai.
From 2013-2018 he taught as a full time Visiting Artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.