View of Manfred Pernice, “dosen,cassetten,Zeugs” at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna, 2015. Manfred Pernice, Gruppe 2, 2014.
Art-Agenda contributing editor Chris Sharp has written a rather humorous and incisive review of Manfred Pernice’s latest show at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder in Vienna. He writes:
“Literally trashing minimalism, these works deflate the high seriousness of modern sculpture while nevertheless seriously engaging it on its own terms. These latter are as marginal as they provisional, which is to say that the work is marked by a willful marginality, influenced in equal parts by the recycled aesthetic of the second-hand store (or garage sale), anonymous, urban vernacular architectural elements, and a general sense of things being “under construction.” Although eschewing the supposed conclusiveness of minimalism’s total, Q.E.D. rejection of narrative, this work could not be said to be lacking in conviction, while nevertheless casually incorporating narrative on almost every level, and, even more importantly, reveling in its own provisional constructed-ness. And this is refreshing. For in an era increasingly dominated by a kind of performative provisionality, in which a given work must hold it together just long enough to be photographed (and photoshopped), Pernice’s sculpture is (anti-)heroically classical by virtue of its natural resistance to the two-dimensional.”