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Whitebank Fine Art

Heimo Zobernig valuation

Austrian artist who treats the gallery, the plinth and the colour chart as the actual material.

Heimo Zobernig was born at Mauthen in Austria in 1958 and trained in Vienna in stage design as well as fine art, which is visible in everything he does.

What a work by Heimo Zobernig is worth

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Bio

Heimo Zobernig was born at Mauthen in Austria in 1958 and trained in Vienna in stage design as well as fine art, which is visible in everything he does. He works across painting, sculpture, video, furniture and exhibition architecture, and the recurring subject is the apparatus itself: the plinth, the partition wall, the shelf, the standard colour, the gallery's own proportions, treated as material rather than as support. He emptied the Austrian pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale down to a black ceiling and floor. He taught for many years at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

A market principally in Austria, Germany and Switzerland with strong institutional standing and a comparatively quiet auction record. Paintings — frequently monochromes, grids or works using standard industrial colours on canvas — lead, alongside the sculptural furniture and shelf pieces. Because the works often use commercial paint and untreated industrial materials deliberately, surface irregularities and visible manufacture are original and are regularly misreported as flaws. Editions and multiples exist and should be distinguished from unique work.

At a glance

Born
1958, Kötschach-Mauthen
Movement
Conceptual art

More on Wikipedia.

The Vienna academies, documenta and Münster

Zobernig studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna from 1977 to 1980 and graduated from the University of Applied Arts there in 1983. After teaching in Hamburg in 1994 and 1995 and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt in 1999 and 2000, he became professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 2000.

He took part in documenta 9 in 1992, documenta 10 and Skulptur Projekte Münster in 1997, and through the 1990s furnished canteens, conference rooms and pavilions for art institutions. Mumok in Vienna showed him in 2002, and the Kunsthalle Basel and K21 in Düsseldorf in 2003.

Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.

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Whitebank Fine Art is a London art advisory and gallery. A photograph and a few details are enough to begin — a valuation carries no obligation to proceed.

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