Bruno Gironcoli & Toni Schmale’s Machines for Thinking

ALBERTINA MODERN is presenting a joint exhibition of works by the Austrian artist Bruno Gironcoli and the Vienna-based sculptor Toni Schmale. The impetus for this exhibition was a large donation by Agnes Essl, comprising 155 of Gironcoli’s drawings. This self-contained series, created over a six-year period during the 1980s, shows the artist as we hardly know him: his unique and fascinating pencil drawings stand wholly apart from Gironcoli’s more familiar works. In their immaculately refined execution, they exude an improbable degree of plasticity.

More than being simply sketches for future sculptures, these drawings much rather represent time-independent simulations of such works’ possible or impossible states and uses. Gironcoli’s drawings, complemented by further works from the collection holdings, are juxtaposed in this exhibition with sculptures by Toni Schmale. Much like in Gironcoli’s case, Schmale’s works—in which materials such as metal and concrete play a dominant role—evoke associations with possible uses thanks to their titles and forms. In this, they also imply human interaction—a bodily aspect that gives rise to questions of identity, gender, role attributions, and power relations.

“I distort objects in my own way in order to see how the subject does in the world of things. Even so, my objects are not machines—I hate machines!—but rather organized things.”
(Bruno Gironcoli)

“My sculptures seem like whole objects but actually consist of numerous small parts, fragments; you don’t see how they’re all put together, though. And it’s precisely this that’s important to me—that one doesn’t even begin to contemplate how the parts go together. My works are collages of the most varied machines that get combined to form a new machine. This new “machine” no longer directly reveals what can be done with it but instead evokes associations with all kinds of apparatuses like gym or agricultural equipment. In my sculptures, I warp these other types of functionality and take them to a different level.”
(Toni Schmale)

Curator: Elsy Lahner