Enjoy with all the senses. Vienna House Martinspark Dornbirn in the middle of beautiful Vorarlberg is Austria’s first architecture hotel, where art, culture and enjoyment combine in an electrifying symbiosis.
Seven
Let the art come to you. Seven works of art grace Vienna House Martinspark Dornbirn. Don’t go looking for them; give yourself up to the chance encounter.
Butterflies
“Butterflies 1994/95” takes a box of matches with the motif of a butterfly as the starting point for a dialogue between the artist and the user who is asked to spontaneously alter the picture at will. Enlarged photographs of the modified motifs hang in the rooms of Vienna House Martinspark Dornbirn. The concept consists of one hundred distinct photographic reproductions of the used boxes and nine different matchboxes.
Bodycheck
The four-part sculpture “Bodycheck/Physical Sculpture No. 5” is one of the main works in the oeuvre of Wolfgang Flatz (*Dornbirn, 1952). Originally created for Documenta IX in Kassel in 1992, it met with great interest among artists, critics and the public. “’Bodycheck/Physical Sculpture No. 5’ is a metaphor for the interaction between power and mass, form and content, violence and provocation, aggressor and victim, artist and society, and a piece of life.” (Flatz, 1991)
Water
The focus of the two-part sculpture “Element of Energy” is on water. The artist uses the life element as a raw material for his sculpture and as a symbol for the essence of art, which he sees as the raw material of life. The water is employed in two formations: as a rushing, untamed mass in the exterior, and as a controlled, single unit – a waterdrop – in the hotel lobby.
Red
“Red Constellation” by Imi Knobel can be found on the 2nd and 3rd floor of the hotel. At the centre of the abstract visual language are squares, rectangles and circular segments. The essential materials are wood strips, hardboard, plywood, paper, and oil and acrylic colours. The playful approach to the geometry results in image formations with a great lightness and spatial presence.
Chrysanthemums
The large, free-standing chrysanthemums are a welcome change from the intricate boughs and flowery vines that designer Josef Frank (1885–1967) often used in the textile patterns he was better known for. After fleeing persecution at home, the famous Viennese architect of Jewish ancestry settled in Sweden and imposed a ban on exporting his works to the countries responsible for the Second World War. As a result, his art has only been accessible and available in Austria since the 1980s.
Borders
Heinrich Dunst’s artistic intention follows a visual syntax – and a very strategic one – to realise interactions of form in the service of visual expression. It is precisely because borders do exist – even if they are not at first apparent – that their discernibility is ever dominant.
Light
László Moholy-Nagy’s interest in using light as a means of perception in the fine arts pushed his work beyond classic panel painting. He was one of the first artists to use photograms, photomontage and photography to establish these processes as legitimate media in the fine arts on a par with painting.