PARASOPHIA 京都国際現代芸術祭2015

Florian Pumhösl
b. 1971 in Vienna, Austria; based in Vienna

Works in exhibition
Florian Pumhösl, Mezamashi-tai, 2014/2015
Monotype print with oil paint on plaster
Set of 16

Artist unknown, Tokyo Sayoku Gekijō banner, date unknown
Collection of the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University

Tomoyoshi Murayama, A Portrait of a Jewish Girl, 1922
Collection of The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
* No photography allowed

See all installation views at higher resolution: www.flickr.com/photos/parasophia/sets/72157656873859885

Florian Pumhösl has participated in many international exhibitions, including the 2001 Yokohama Triennale and Documenta 12 (2007). He creates paintings, films, and installations that are not only based on thorough research of specific examples of modern avant-garde art, graphic design, typography, and architecture, but in certain cases also visualize his research and analysis. Pumhösl’s research is characterized by his perspective as an artist, rather than a historian, with his focus on his involvement with his subjects’ visual language and their transition rather than tracing back their origins. His solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery in London (2008) consisted of a historical component, with actual books designed by the Japanese artist Koshiro Onchi in the 1930s in wall-mounted display cases, and Pumhösl’s paintings made of synthetic resin on glass plates, based on his highly focused studies of Onchi’s books and their formal elements.
Pumhösl visited Japan in the spring of 2014 to perform further research on Onchi, as well as Tomoyoshi Murayama of the Mavo group and other Japanese avant-garde artists active in the 1920s–30s. A photograph of an agitprop troupe is Pumhösl’s primary inspiration for his paintings, which are done on plaster panels made by an artisan in Kyoto based on traditional Japanese measurements. The artist will place his own abstract paintings based on this scene between A Portrait of a Jewish Girl (1922) by Tomoyoshi Murayama and a banner of the Tokyo Sayoku Gekijō (Tokyo Left-Wing Theater).

• Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art