Florian Pumhösl

In 2005, Pumhösl held a solo show, Animated Map, at Neue Kunsthalle St. Gallen, Switzerland. Consisting of a film, a book, Pumhösl's Eetkamer glass paintings, and a correspondent exhibition, the project examined Pre-Columbian cotton lace from Chacay civilization, central coast of Peru (900-1532); a Picture clock (c. 1830); F. Percy Smith's film Fight for the Dardanelles (1915); László Moholy-Nagy's Schwarz-rotes Gleichgewicht (1922); the Bauhaus traveling exhibition installed by Hannes Meyer (1929); Georges Vantongerloo's Untitled (3 Concrete Studies) (c. 1931); and the former St. Gallen Public Warehouse erected in the beginning of the 20th century by Robert Maillart, and where the Neue Kunsthalle is now housed. The book, Animated Map, was published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König in 2007, with texts by Peiro Aguirre, Burkhard Meltzer and Florian Pumhösl.[9]

In 2007, Pumhösl presented the installation and picture cycle Modernology (2007), which was exhibited at documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany. For the project, Pumhösl identified and expressed in a formal vocabulary a reciprocal exchange between the German, Russian, and Japanese avant-gardes in the interwar period. Addressed in the work were artist-designer Murayama Tomoyoshi's Triangular Studio (1926) and the black walls of the "Der Sturm" exhibition in Tokyo in 1914, among others. Philosopher Juliane Rebentisch described the work as the following: "What may be experienced in this way is less the act of translation between the cultures than culture itself as translation...It opposes both the conservative notion of self-contained cultures as well as the neoliberal goal, currently becoming reality, of a single world culture."[10]

Pumhösl staged an exhibition, 678, at Mumok in Vienna, Austria, in 2011. In this show, Pumhösl presented two film installations, Expressive Rhythm and Tract, and a comprehensive cycle of images, Diminution. Expressive Rhythm refers to Alexander Rodchenko's gouache Expressive Rhythm (1942), which anticipates Jackson Pollock's style of painting and serves as a testimony to the nexus between gestural abstraction, automation, and trauma.[11] Tract is a film hybrid between abstract animation and a dance film. Diminution, a 48-image cycle whose name refers to the repetition and diminution of a motive in musical compositional theory, addresses 'a society' of images as understood spatially, or as a kind of post-individualist score. Parallel to the exhibition, Pumhösl also co-organized the re-installation of classical modern art on Level 8 of the museum with the title "Abstract Space" with curator Matthias Michalka. Michalka wrote that the exhibition "explor[ed] the relationship between the showing and the shown, between the title and the exhibition, inevitably result[ing] in a fundamental questioning of the conceptions of the work and the models of authorship..."[12]

The following year, Pumhösl presented a new series at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Räumliche Sequenz (Spatial Sequence), specially produced for the exhibition. The works consist of plaster panels in three different sizes grouped in threes, and the order of each trio beginning with the smallest and ending with the largest format. The progression of the 45-piece series of 15 subjects, subtitled Cliché, stems from Moholy-Nagy's enamel pictures. However, unlike Moholy-Nagy, who delegated the task of his telephone pictures to a firm, Pumhösl applied the formal effects to his panel himself through a cliché stamp. In an interview with Yilmaz Dziewior, remarking on the "varying relations" to which the pictures were hung, Pumhösl remarked that the series was "not site but space related."[13]

In 2014, Pumhösl held his first solo exhibition at Miguel Abreu Gallery, in which he showed six paintings depicting formally reduced letters from the Georgian Mkhreduli alphabet and twelve paintings based on a 19th-century rabbinical map ("Eretz Israel," from Boundaries of the Land by Rabbi Joshua Feiwel ben Israel, Grodno, 1813).[14] In transferring the map and interpreting Georgian letterforms, Pumhösl empties these systems of their use value and opens them up to other associations.

In the second issue of Makhuzine, an outgrowth of the Dutch Artistic Research Event (DARE) symposium, Pumhösl describes his work as the following:

In the last ten years, many arguments in the debate on Modernism have been dominated by arguments of critique, critical distance, and critical discourse. That widely criticized debate has become a messy discourse. My work connects to the prevalent discourse about artistic research, as it involves research, but for me research is only a tool leading to experience. Experience might sound like a conservative term, but I lack a better one. To me experience implies a process of reception and identification, of separating and displacing elements from genealogies."[15]