Moni K. Huber Moni K. Huber

MONI K. HUBER

For her solo exhibition in the Strabag Artlounge, Moni K. Huber created the new series In der Baufirma. The Salzburg-born artist studied in Madrid, later at the University of Applied Arts and lives and works in Vienna. Numerous stays abroad and the related projects, series and self-presentations include topics such as landscape, architecture, tradition and modernity. Her most important series Pools, Lofts (Location of the Leisure Class, Catalog), Backstage Tourism, Panorama Wagrain or Lake Point View show in a critically ironic way the often absurd involvement and behavior of people in their environment. Many sequences were created on the basis of video stills or photos. For several years now, the artist has shown the interrelationship between the so-called “leisure class” and the modern architecture created for her, which integrates people like a sculpture frozen in their autonomy. In Moni K. Huber's pictures, architectural and constructive elements meet in chronological order with atmospheric sections of the landscape. The cinematic nature of the sequence of images, the fragmentation of a private moment spent in anonymity, are reflected in the situations presented. Looking at the pictures in the interplay of observing and being observed, perception and identity, leaving out what is unambiguous in the “observation space” make the works so memorable.
Barbara Baum, Strabag Art Forum

“[…] The dog men also appear in the second large group of pictures by Moni K. Huber, which is set in an upper class apartment on the 67th floor of the Lake Point Tower on the shores of Lake Michigan in Chicago. This building, which was inspired by a design by Mies van der Rohe in 1921, planned by John Heinrich and George Schipporeit and completed in 1968, was for a long time the tallest residential building in the world with its 70 floors. With its streamlined, rounded, three-winged floor plan and its glass curtain wall that provides an all-round view, it is something like the monumental apotheosis of “liberated living”. The window wall, which has no corners in a slight curve, offers a breathtaking panorama in cinemascope format, which is only occasionally interrupted by the reinforced concrete pillars set inwards. The floor and ceiling are designed as smooth, light panes that fully focus the view on the panorama. One could say: The lack of built-in fittings and larger furniture almost completely transfers the spatial experience into a purely optical one that is absorbed by the distant image of the panorama. The loft-like apartment becomes a machine of vision, a built eye, and stands in the long tradition of those panoptic buildings that are so significant for modern disciplinary societies that Michel Foucault described in “Surveillance and Punish”.
The artist has staged herself as the regent of this space of observation that inspires fantasies of omnipotence (an opportunity that was offered to her due to her “official” status as an Austrian artist in residence in Chicago). In a cocktail dress and with mirrored (!) Glasses, she poses as a sophisticated landlady, while the dog-masked men are naked or only dressed in (Austrian-patriotic) red-white-red bathing trunks and pose in a submissive manner in an ambience that is clearly unfamiliar to them.

Moni K. Huber's pictures alternate between a painterly atmosphere and a concrete constructive composition, for example when they allow a view from the bungalow into the surroundings.
Mag. Florian Steininger Curator Ba-Ca Kunstforum, Vienna

Moni K. Huber succeeds in conducting her critical examination of modernism in a very subtle and playful way. Her pictures are not illustrated theory, but convince above all as autonomous, surprising as well as concentrated pictorial inventions, the interpretation of which is by no means exhausted in the few hints that could be made here. ”(Anselm Wagner)

To the series "in the Sankeien Garden, Yokohama"

I went for a lot of walks during my stay in Yokohama. Around me a futuristic tangle of skyscrapers, new buildings, office towers, built on landfill - heaped up land reclaimed from the sea. In the summer sultry cranes, neon signs, advertising and consumption flickered. Since I could only paint with my eyes, I kept thinking about how I would create my new series of pictures and which of these elements I would incorporate.
Back in the atelier in Austria, I took a completely different template: It was my photo series from the Sankeien garden in Yokohama. The park was laid out at the end of the 19th century, at the time of the forced industrialization of Japan, by a large industrialist who dismantled traditional Japanese houses, temples and shrines all over the country and rebuilt them in its landscaped gardens. Today the park is an oasis of green in the middle of the vast sea of ​​houses in the Tokyo-Yokohama area and a kind of open-air museum where the Japanese visit their own past. The old Japan, which one has in mind in the form of atmospheric gardens and traditional houses made of wood and paper on pictures of Japan, is just as artificial as the areas of my long walks around the Yokohamabay.
Moni K. Huber

MONI K. HUBER

Born in Salzburg in 1969
1987-88 San Fernando Art Academy, Madrid
1988-93 University of Applied Arts, Vienna
1994-2005 assistant at the International Summer Academy for Fine Arts, Salzburg
1999-2000 project in Mendoza, Argentina
2002 Theodor Körner Prize
2004 Artist-in-Residence, Chicago
2006 working stay in Yokohama, Japan
Lives and works in Vienna

Exhibitions (selection)

2006        
Im Lake Point Tower; Galerie Unart, Villach
Galerie Altnöder zeigt Bilder in dem Büro der Altstadtwerbung,     
Wau, Wau; der Hund in der bildenden Kunst, Galerie Art Mark, 
Spital Phyrn, Altaussee (Gruppenaust.)

2005           
Im Garten; Galerie im Traklhaus (Gruppenaust., Kat.)
Katalog leisure class anlässlich einer Ausstellung in der Galerie
Traklhaus, 2005
Der transatlantische Hund; Galerie Pro Arte, Hallein 
As, on, and about painting; Museum of Contemporary Photography, 
Chicago (Gruppenaust.)
Heimart, die Rezeption des Heimatlichen u. typisch Österreichischen in 
der zeitgenöss. Kunst; Deutschvilla, Strobl am Wolfgangsee      
Wasserspiegelbild; Galerie Wolfrum, Wien (Gruppenaust.)
Volle Tube; Galerie der Stadt Wels (Gruppenaust.)

2004
Farbe + Kontraste und Nebenwirkungen; Kunsthaus Essen 
Water aspects; ARTlab Galerie Hilger, Wien (Gruppenaust.)
Backstage*tourismus; Forum Stadtpark, Graz (Gruppenaust.)
Waterresistent; Wasserturm, Wien (Gruppenaust.)

2003          
Leisure Class; ARTlab Galerie Hilger, Galerie Exner, Wien                  
(Gruppenaust.)
Multiples; Jahresausstellung im Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg
(Gruppenaust.)

www.galerie-unart.at
www.moni-k-huber.at