The piece Baugerüst consisted of a standard scaffold, sixty meters long and six meters high, installed in the field next to the railway station of the town of Kefermarkt. Not attached to any building, the now functionless scaffold stood alone in the meadow, with one end lying flat on the ground. The imposing, yet at the same time fragile structure seemed to be frozen in time, an elegant twist that crossed its entire length, taking it from an upright to a horizontal position.
As in previous projects, Pia Mayrwöger explored the nature of an object from the realm of construction, through which she sounded out the boundaries between industrial product and artistic value. In this case, the focus was on scaffolding, which lost its common purpose and was declared a sculpture, thereby becoming a monument to the fragility of our condition. The end, however, was not declared: the turning, sinking, or bending movement could also be seen as the act of rising or standing up, as a sturdy inanimate trace of a human attempt to gain control over the surrounding territories and landscapes.
Documentation
Impressions
CV
Pia Mayrwöger deals with the phenomena of work shaped by craft in her artistic practice. She combines art and the realm of building in order to explore the relationships between ecology, economics, and growth. For this she focusses on technical and aesthetic aspects of machines the functions of which have been displaced or turned on its head entirely. Her works centre around the impression given by the machines, and imparts them with a unique and sculptural quality that shifts between surreal poetry and ironic surprise.