Dr. Wilbertz: An Art Historical Essay on the Exhibition IMPERFEKT by Rainer Nöbauer-Kammerer, MAERZ Gallery, Linz, Austria

Dr. Wilbertz: An Art Historical Essay on the Exhibition IMPERFEKT

by Rainer Nöbauer-Kammerer, MAERZ Gallery

“Due regard will be paid to durability when the foundations are carried down to solid ground and when the materials, of whatever kind, are carefully selected and applied without parsimony.”

Vitruvius, De Architectura Libri Decem, Book I, Chapter 3 (c. 33–14 BC)

For the ancient architectural theorist Vitruvius, firmitas (durability) constitutes the foundation—and the first category—of all built reality. It is not only a prerequisite for the utility and function of what is built, but also for its aesthetic quality and effect. A well-constructed building designed for permanence provides people with security, protection, and a sense of belonging. It is closely linked to our notions of beauty.

Structural damage, ruptures, and defects are indicators of decay and destruction. They manifest themselves on the surface of a building, yet their causes often lie hidden deep within its inaccessible structural substance. Our dwellings are indispensable foundations of human existence. When they become fragile or damaged, this results in a tangible sense of uncertainty and disturbance to our psychological well-being. The unconscious is triggered; we lose stability.

Rainer Nöbauer’s body of work IMPERFEKT addresses precisely these conditions and thus becomes a symbolic reflection of a reality that is becoming increasingly unstable. The production and reception of images—particularly within digital environments and pseudo-valued product worlds—are becoming ever more perfected, while at the same time the social, cultural, and human principles that once provided stability and cohesion are losing their constitutive relevance. (Self-)destruction has become the new paradigm.

Since the early 1960s, the artistic strategies of the Nouveaux Réalistes have belonged to a broad and highly heterogeneous group of international positions that take materiality, its questioning, and the processes of damage and destruction as the starting point of artistic practice. Their target was the complacent saturation of postwar prosperity society, whose artistic production often exhausted itself in the aesthetic affirmation of a belated and frequently decorative understanding of modernity. The parallels to today’s oversaturated digital world are difficult to ignore.

Rainer Nöbauer employs artistic strategies of imitation and simulation without foregrounding his own authorial presence or artistic signature. The works in the IMPERFEKT series present themselves as an objectively conceived collection which, comparable to the moulages of the nineteenth century, displays fragments of an injured—or perhaps diseased—body (the house). Physical and chemical processes and their resulting manifestations are initiated, simulated, systematically explored, and presented as phenomena of quiet and undramatic destruction.

Framing, traditional modes of display, hanging methods, and the almost classical placement of the sculptures within the exhibition space are elements of a carefully considered presentation and musealization that initially render the damage and ruptures seemingly harmless. The same applies to the perfection of execution, which possesses considerable aestheticizing potential. The resulting “images” follow artistic and aesthetic principles associated with modernism both before and after 1945.

Abstraction, Informel, and autonomous processes of artistic formation give rise to works of remarkable graphic, painterly, and sculptural quality. These works demand to be taken seriously and should by no means be understood as ironic commentaries on the fragilities and injuries of the present. Rather, they seek to make visible the aesthetic and artistic potentials inherent in destructive processes without, in the literal sense, beautifying them.

If one engages with these works, they reveal that disturbing forces are at work beneath the surface— not only of what is built. Small and large catastrophes may be their consequence. The acceptance of the “ugly,” in opposition to the “classically beautiful,” and its artistic manifestations as part of existence and reality had already been articulated by Karl Rosenkranz in his Aesthetics of Ugliness (1853):

“This inner connection of the beautiful with the ugly as its self-destruction also establishes the possibility that the ugly may in turn negate itself; that, existing as the negative of the beautiful, it resolves its contradiction to beauty and returns to unity with it.”

Karl Rosenkranz, Aesthetics of Ugliness (1853)

Few formulations could summarize Rainer Nöbauer’s artistic programme more aptly.

IMPERFEKT – The Beauty of Imperfection

Artist Rainer Nöbauer-Kammerer’s new body of work is inspired by structural defects and signs of decay found in 20th- and 21st-century architecture. The damage, defects and structural injuries observable in these buildings are artistically and sculpturally reinterpreted and transformed into autonomous works of visual art.

IMPERFEKT deliberately transfers flaws and damage—typically regarded as negative phenomena—into the artistic media of sculpture, relief and graphic works. Fracture, flaw and damage are rendered visible and transformed into aesthetic qualities. This is achieved through complex and deliberate material processes and mechanical interventions that generate calculated flaws and damage within the works themselves. The result is cracks, spalling, instabilities, as well as accelerated oxidation and mould-growth processes. Further strategies of aestheticisation emerge through acts of collecting and museum display within the MAERZ space, newly reconfigured for the exhibition.

At a time of social upheaval and uncertainty, IMPERFEKT deliberately challenges the prevailing dogma of perfection, countering it with an aesthetic of underlying imperfection.

Biographie:

Rainer Nöbauer-Kammerer was born in Linz in 1979. After training as a sculptor, he studied Fine Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Arts Linz. His artistic practice explores social attributions and conventions, using them to develop independent, often interdisciplinary approaches. By combining perspectives from the natural and cultural sciences with specific situations and contexts, his work challenges established categorisations and patterns of perception. Rainer Nöbauer-Kammerer subtly develops an aesthetic of resistance without explicitly naming it as such.

His work has been recognised with awards and grants, most recently the State Grant for Fine Art from the Republic of Austria (2024). International exhibition and residency experience, including projects at CCA Glasgow, Salzburger Kunstverein, Transit Photographies Montpellier, Forum Stadtpark Graz, Stadtgalerie Bern, Künstlerhaus Dortmund, Mana Contemporary New York and S.Y.P Art Space Tokyo. Lectures at the University of Art and Design Linz.

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