Ernst Caramelle. Artist’s Books & Video Landscapes

Ernst Caramelle (Hall in Tirol, AT, 1952–Frankfurt am Main, DE, and New York, US) is one of the defining voices in Austrian conceptual art. His multifaceted oeuvre revolves not around the object but around the idea—which manifests itself in a variety of media: as a drawing, wall piece, video, or artist’s book. Caramelle has harnessed the artist’s book as a distinctive creative medium since 1973: it has served him as a space of reflection on original and reproduction, image and text, idea and execution.

The exhibition focuses on this ongoing engagement with the book medium and juxtaposes it with Caramelle’s early photographic series Video Landscapes (1974). The latter integrates video images into the material setting so that they fuse with their surroundings—confounding the distinction between media construction and physical reality. Both bodies of work address central questions around perception, visual production, and representation between the poles of idea, medium, and reality.

The Reading and Media Lounge invites visitors to delve deeper. It presents selected literature from the museum’s and the Generali Foundation’s libraries related to the various exhibitions at the museum and offers access to the media library’s holdings of around five hundred films and videos.