Pierre Bismuth

Christine König Galerie Schleifmühlgasse 1a 1040 Vienna Austria (city map) Send E-mail tel +43-(0)1-585 74 74 www.christinekoeniggalerie.com

PIERRE BISMUTH employs artistic practice as a tool for examining our perception of reality as well as our relation to culture and it´s productions. The underlying aim of his works is always the same – to destabilize pre-established codes of perception and to push the viewer to become critical and incredulous even when presented with cultural objects whose meaning appears self-evident.

This exhibition presents for the first time in Austria a body of works that shows clearly how Pierre Bismuth uses the same method in manipulating diverse materials. Pierre Bismuth creates unexpected shifts in the everyday meaning of things in order to provoke a change in perceptual habits, thus opening the space for an understanding of the world beyond its constructed meaning. The immediate accessibility of the materials employed by the artist proves to be a kind of decoy or lure, which eventually leads the spectator to distance him or herself from the usual network of significations and implications in which they are embedded. In this sense Pierre Bismuth never tries to add new meanings to the objects that he manipulates, but aims simply to neutralize their initial meaning and thereby delay the act of understanding. His art is above all one of SUSPENSION.