Florian Pumhösl
For nearly three decades, Florian Pumhösl’s art has probed various modernist vocabularies and repertoires of signs in a way that is concentrated and, for the most part, highly reduced in a formal sense. Starting from such disparate fields of reference as architecture, urban planning, typography, fashion design, cartography, dance, and—not to be forgotten—the development of abstract languages of painting and graphic design, Pumhösl’s often serially produced works reveal the high level of ambivalence inherent in the sort of pluri-modernism that permeates the here and now. His reverse glass paintings,
photograms, black prints, engravings, reliefs, display systems, and films, done in reference to various sites of historical modernist efforts scattered across the world, not only point to an insoluble entanglement of formal languages and historicity but also concentrate within themselves the insuppressible and frequently conflicting impulses of “modernological” creation. In their sometimes baffling(ly profound) simplicity, these works make clear the extent to which the tendency towards abstraction always merges into historically charged—and often also socioculturally contingent—acts of concretion; the extent to which the supposedly reproductive attitude of historical and reflective approaches always reveals an additional measure of formal content and associated “eccentric” experience as a specific act of transference; and the extent to which, finally, dealing with modernist character registers in a conceptual manner inevitably involves an aestheticist flipside (and vice versa). In this way, Pumhösl’s visually condensed examinations and series can also always be read as (cautiously and implicitly offered) criticism of commonplace critiques of modernism. It was quite early on in his career that Pumhösl first created concise works focused on non-Western modernist reservoirs (such as Uganda, Tanzania, Madagascar, and Brazil) that contradicted the narrative according to which modernism established a global hegemony under the control of Western centers. The simplistic view according to which the design principles of Weimar’s Bauhaus were beholden to “pure form” is rendered more complex in works that take inspiration from figures such as László Moholy-Nagy or Hannes Meyer without simply reproducing their reductive approaches, instead “opening them up” toward a multiplicity of significances. The fact that the key to formal progression—i.e., the derivability of complex design patterns from elementary principles—can ultimately be found just as much in Japanese kimono designs or historical dance choreographies as it can in the Georgian alphabet (Mkhedruli) or a historical map of Israel is made clear by a number of further works that are as elegant as they are maximally condensed. C.H.
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