GRENZGÄNGER
ELENA KONEFF, VADIM KOSMATSCHOF, STUART VEECH
Curated by Angela Stief
The artistic life and work of the Veech-Kosmatschof-Koneff family is characterized by crossing borders between tradition and innovation, between cultures and languages, between media and materials - always connected with exploring the limits of what is possible. In addition to the willingness to take risks and the courage to change, the unifying force is the dedication to art, the creation of creative freedom and, last but not least, a place that unites all of this: the Studio X2732 hall, which was designed and built by the architect duo Mascha Veech-Kosmatschof and Stuart Veech (Veech x Veech) and completed in 2024. Production, presentation and an intensive artistic exchange take place here. The hall is a resonating space for visual art, architecture, design and a dialog open to the world.
The current exhibition Border Crossers is dedicated to a treasure long hidden from the art public and brings together works by the artist couple Elena Koneff (*1939, Moscow) and Vadim Kosmatschof (*1938, Kaluga) from the 1970s, which were created in Moscow at the time independently of the dictates of political ideology.
They are juxtaposed with the reflective, black objects by Stuart Veech (* 1964, Chicago) in the tradition of American minimalism. The mutual inspiration creates a dialog between cultures, a border crossing between completely different worlds and generations, which in the case of the artist couple Koneff-Kosmatschof had to fight hard for their artistic freedom. Their struggle characterizes their work.
Abstraction and a reduced use of color, the contrasting strength of black and white, as well as the exploration of material aesthetic aspects run through the works of the three artists and form the lowest common denominator of an artistic practice that is formed in a direct exchange and in the confrontation with completely different creative ideas. The absence of color in the exhibition underscores the autonomy of form and explores the structural possibilities of art. Last but not least, it points to the conditions of production and the social factor that is decisive for the joint presentation of these positions.
The arrangement of Elena Koneff's Black Reliefs in Studio X2732 is a loose but unmistakable allusion to the hanging of Kazimir Malevich's The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting 0.10 in St. Petersburg in 1915: Monochrome forms on a white background. Suprematist-looking works made of rope, hemp cords, rope ropes, yarns and hawsers - knotted, knotted, woven and braided. Koneff, who was one of the most important representatives of textile art in Moscow in the 1970s, chooses elementary forms such as rectangles, squares and circles for her sculptural fiber objects, the so-called Black Reliefs, from which black-on-black organic structures and ornamentally arranged figures stand out. These space-expanding textile objects, which Georg Schöllhammer once aptly called “Woven Mindscapes”, are landscapes of an inner world of thoughts and souls. They oscillate between early vision and artistic maturity, between structural rigor and sensual openness.
Just like Koneff, Kosmatschof manages the balancing act of emancipating materials that are traditionally found in the applied arts in the visual arts. This is another reason why, in both cases, making art always implies liberation from a repressive system. Kosmatschof designed his avant-garde water machines made of industrial porcelain in Moscow in the first half of the 1970s. In the totalitarian regime of the USSR at the time, visual art had to follow the doctrines of socialist realism. However, Kosmatschof's works were created in a direct confrontation with the Russian avant-garde. After emigrating in 1979, when the artist couple had already been living in Germany and Austria for many years, Kosmatschof translated the dynamics of these early sculptures into kinetic works such as Unfolding Square, an expansive installation gleaming in futuristic silver, which unfolds in the slow passage of time, only to fold up again.
The missing link between Koneff's Black Reliefs and Kosmatschof's Unfolding Square are the modular, abstract-geometric objects by US artist and architect Stuart Veech. The artist develops minimal surfaces from synthetic rubber, which he stretches over invisible constructions like a skin. For the aesthetic result, he makes use of physical laws: The spatial structures gain their form both through the corresponding tension, saving energy in the material, and through the reflective power of light. The syntax of these specific objects, which the artist, unlike Italian artists such as Agostino Bonalumi and Enrico Castellani, produces exclusively in black, is created through repetition and variation - shifting and turning - of the individual, identical elements, which Veech seamlessly strings together. These modular objects are an impressive play with dimensions: Line, surface, space and time.
Angela Stief
STUDIO X2732
Neue Welt-Straße 13, 2732 Höflein an der Hohen Wand, Austria
Exhibition is on view until November 30, 2025