Walter Swennen expose dans le cadre de « Why painting now ? – Curated by Vienna 2013 ». Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder. Le commissariat de l’exposition est confié à Miguel Wandschneider.

Walter Swennen
Geen grofvuil, 2010
oil on found laminated panel, 53,5 x 60

Truth lies in the words. It has once been said: “as stupid as a painter”. Stupidity is the name of the real with which the thinking is in dispute. Painting has to do with the real. So I keep myself busy with stupidities. Some like to think of decline or of everincreasing inner void. But there doesn’t exist an inner world. (Having a headache doesn’t necessarily mean that one has been thinking — and maybe this also applies to painting: one’s eyes simply smart.) It is simply, hopelessly, comic. (Walter Swennen, 1988)

Artist
Walter Swennen (Brüssel Brussels)
Curated by Miguel Wandschneider.
Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie
SchwarzwälderGrünangergasse 1, 1010 Vienna

The attention which the medium of painting presently demands constitutes the driving motive behind the decision to explore its potent effects as well as its conceptual and historical premises in regard to its perception. The fifth edition of curated by_vienna, initiated by departure ‑ The Creative Agency of the City of Vienna, aims at launching a discussion that centers on a reflection of today’s discourse of painting.
Under the title “Why Painting Now?” selected Viennese galleries will present a number of exhibitions conceived by international curators. “Why Painting Now?” examines the motives for regarding painting as a medium suited to capture, critically highlight, or escape the structures of information and communication media decisively oriented toward the visual parameters of art. The dependence of painting on the desire for seeing it essentialistically charged and its involvement in the production of this desire are as much at issue as the search for a long-term guarantee of its value. By taking up the challenge of examining these requests and analyzing its historical commitments and foundations, painting may mark out a discursive field that transcends the individual picture and artist personality and thus makes itself comprehensible as a social process. As artistic production and aesthetic perception expose themselves to their mutual effects, painting turns into a pervious medium that cannot be confined to the canvas alone. It will be necessary to discuss anti-academic and pop-cultural strategies in conjunction with those institutional, social and economic conditions which actually produce the “dispositif”1 of painting. It is exactly the focus on social and institutional formations in which painting is embedded along whose lines “Why Painting Now?” pursues the issue of the complex relationship between picture, discourse, text, and perception and the parameters painting adheres to.

Curated by_vienna 2013
Opening
Thursday, October 10, 2013, 6 – 9 pm
in 20 leading Viennese galleries for contemporary art
Duration
October 11 – November 14, 2013

Miguel Wandschneider
b. in 1969, lives and works in Lisbon
Since 2006, Miguel Wandschneider has been curating the exhibition program of Culturgest in Lisbon, as well as many of the exhibitions within this program (most of which were survey exhibitions), including those of Walid Raad/The Atlas Group, Jean-Luc Moulène, Willem Oorebeek, Jochen Lempert, Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, Asier Mendizabal, Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Michael E. Smith, Katinka Bock, Jef Geys, Michel Auder, and Walter Swennen.
In 2012, he was nominated for the Menil Foundation’s Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement. He is currently a member of the Generali Foundation’s Artistic Advisory Board in Vienna (2013‒2015).

[sociallinkz]