Patrick Baumüller Walking the Plank

Opening:
Friday, June 19 from 4 p.m. to 11 p.m.
Saturday, June 20 from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.
galerie michaela stock, Schleifmühlgasse 18, 1040 Vienna

Guided tour with Patrick Baumüller & Michaela Stock with Aperitivo Averna. Only up to 105people can stay in the gallery and take part in the tour.

The new exhibition "Walking the Plank" by the Tyrolean artist Patrick Baumüller gives an insight into the global consequences of today's consumer society and deals with the biggest driver, deforestation. At the first glance playful sculptures and kinetic installations let the visitor's thoughts revolve around current environmental, economic and existential questions. A lot of it hovers in the air, it hangs on a thin thread of self-forgotten uncertainty or stands sometimes on feet of clay.

In the exhibition we are confronted with a model of a Trojan horse on a skateboard. The animal's skin was processed with casts from used packaging of Chinese fast food. These are "decoratively" attached to the surface of the supposed gift.
One another work in the exhibition, a parquet board made of precious tropical wood with Chinese lettering refers on the one hand, to the title of the show and on the other hand, to the overexploitation of nature. Patrick Baumüller provides the piece of wood with a Chinese inscription, which in English translation sounds like a prophetic saying: "The forest disappears by time, but this piece of wood, I proudly say, is mine."

In the multi-layered and ambiguous title "Walking the Plank," the connotations range from the traditional form of execution on early pirate ships to the idiomatic expression from the business world when someone is told to resign after a business mistake. In many aspects the greed for material possessions at any price is also addressed. Baumüller leaves this "warning sign" in the room as a mockery to indicate a disproportion between nature and civilization.