Overview
Florian Pumhösl
Florian Pumhösl born 1971, Vienna, Austria, where he lives and works.
Pumhösl’s work is constituted by a constellation of historical references encoded within a visual language that appears purely formal. The apparent abstraction of his paintings, films, and installations is anchored by specific archival sources: 17th-century kimono designs, avant-garde typography, WWI military uniform patterns, cartography, Latin American textiles, and early dance notations. Through the selection, reduction, rearrangement, and reproduction of his source materials—unsystematic and subjective modes of transcription—the artist arrives at a vocabulary that is at once abstract and semiotically motivated. Through attention to the social, political, and geographic genealogy of given forms, his works reveal the modernist fantasy of complete self-referentiality haunted by irreducible specificity and cultural instability. 
 
Plumösl had numerous solo exhibitions. Among others, he exhibited in Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; Neue Kunsthalle St. Gallen, Sankt Gallen. He was part of various group exhibitions, including in Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Punta Della Dogana – Francois Pinault Foundation, Venice; 21er Haus, Vienna; Mumok, Vienna; MACBA, Barcelona; Royal College of Art, London; Witte de With Contemporary Art, Rotterdam. During his career, Plumösl won numerous awards and prizes such as the CENTRAL- Kunstpreis in Cologne and the Monsignore Otto Mauer-Preis. His works are featured in many collections among them; MACBA, Barcelona; Mumok, Vienna; MOCA, Los Angeles; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía; Madrid; Pinault Collection, Paris; Tate Modern, London.
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