Heimo Zobernig at Christian Nagel

Heimo Zobernig's show of geometric abstract paintings and drawings from 2004 was a meditation on the possibilities of line, whether narrowed to a faint pencil mark or widened into a blue painted band. Works by this 45-year-old Viennese artist looked crisp and severe: square canvases either diagonally hung and overlaid with grid patterns or horizontally hung and bearing two angled grids that recall a caning pattern. De Stijl comes to mind, of course, though Zobernig's paintings are chillier than Mondrian's, drained of color--but for a TV-monitor blue--and run through a series of systematic permutations rather than arrived at intuitively. Even the paintings' two sizes were determined mathematically: 1 or 2 meters square.

Yet the paintings have an additional neo-Op quality. Lines pulse or vibrate, and ghostly dots flash at the intersections of lines. Moreover, the tape that painters use to guide their lines and subsequently discard, Zobernig sometimes leaves in place on the primed linen. Occasionally the tape's rough ends trail off beyond the canvas. Elsewhere, to create the lines in negative, Zobernig laid a grid of tape on blue-painted canvas, coated the entire surface in white acrylic and finally peeled off the tape to reveal patterns of blue. This self-confessing materiality, a foregrounding of process, undermines the effect of abstract disembodiment.

Also contradicting an initial impression of austerity was a 23-minute silent video (# 22, 2003), looped on a monitor, showing the naked artist engaged in strenuous activity. Like Laocoon wrestling the snakes, Zobernig tangled with a 100-meter, flexible, air-filled blue tube in a choreography both playful and grim. The video seemed poles apart from the wall art, until one saw how the tubing recalled Zobernig's blue-lined grids, with his pale body functioning like a white canvas.

Zobernig's career has been marked by a radical heterodoxy that helps explain the show's mix of geometric compositions and performance. At Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts, he studied set design as well as the art of Max Bill and others associated with Concrete art in Zurich. Painting and video are only part of Zobernig's work, which also includes sculpture, furniture, architecture-based investigations and poetry. Zobernig often collaborates with Franz West. The year 2003 brought a midcareer retrospective at MUMOK in Vienna, Kunsthalle Basel and K21 in Dusseldorf. In this recent play of lines--painted, stenciled and pneumatic--Zobernig walked several: between classical and baroque, and between good- and bad-boy practice, all systematically disturbing his paintings' cool elegance.

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