Since 1986 Heimo Zobernig has used the sans-serif typography Helvetica for his catalogue and poster designs. Once celebrated as an icon of swiss style, Helvetica last its prestige in the course of the 1980s. “Among the typographies Helvetica developed to something similar chipboard is among furniture woods. Its form appears to be so neutral that the viewer forgets that it is a typography“ (1). Beginning in 1990, Zobernig named his exhibitions consecutively from A to Z with letters in Helvetica and in a size of 115 cm. In 1993 he designed a poster for a group exhibition, in colors orange, brown, grey, black and white in which the word REAL appears fort the first time (2). One year later the first REAL-paintings are being created, using the same colors.
Whereas the soberly, artistically created “image“ of each letter leads the viewer to a kind of interpretative trapdoor, the semantic meaning of the painted word REAL opens up to a hall of mirrors with many implications: true, royal, real. As Helmut Draxler writes the painting here names a situation fact literally without redeeming it (3). Piece by piece Zobernig extends the color scale of the REAL-paintings and years later finally adds the word EGAL, taking over the canvas to the same extent as REAL. The works appear to be written into each other, their meaning is repeated. A new, interpretational zero print of complex, constructiveness is reacted. The completely white invitation card, designed by the artist himself, for this exhibition HEIMO ZOBERNIG at Nagel Draxler Kabinett, in which solely REAL/EGAL paintings are being shown, complies with this repeat. In consideration of the different trends of contemporary art (4) since the 1980s, Heimo Zobernig’s „anti-essentialist system“ (5) appears as artistically consequently practiced negative dialectic.
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(1) Matthias Dusini in “Heimo Zobernig. Ausstellung. Katerlog”, Vienna 2003.
(2) For a group exhibition, which took place in 1993 in three institutions (Salzburg Kunstverein, Grazer Kunstverein, Wiener Secession) and accompanied by a text(theory)book Zobernig slipped into the role of the graphic artist and designed the corporate identity: the catalog, invitations, posters and folders. The letters of the main title REAL subordinated Zobernig in reference to Robert Indiana's icon LOVE in four picture frames; the subtitles of the exhibitions were SEX, REAL, TEXT and AIDS (in reference to the appropriation of Indiana by General Idea). Zobernig’s lettering REAL acted as a logo, which could change its wearer depending on the function: picture motif, exhibition title, programmatic slogan.
(3) Helmut Draxler in “Heimo Zobernig. Ausstellung. Katerlog”, Vienna 2003.
(4) and even more so before the recent ones, e.g. of the new Romanticism from 2000, the subsequent hype of abstraction, to the post-Internet generation charged with meaning by paraphilosophies such as Speculative Realism / Materialism
(5) Helmut Draxler in “Heimo Zobernig. Ausstellung. Katerlog”, Vienna 2003.
