The Brooklyn Rail

“Daidalon refers to the Greek myth of the inventor and artist Daedalus, father of Icarus, and Icarus’s tragic decision to fly using his father’s artificial wings. He flew too close to the sun, his wings. held together with wax, failed, and he plummeted to his death.”

— Rudolf Polanszky

A comprehensive exhibition devoted to Rudolf Polanszky is on view at Galerie Krinzinger, whose rooms—formerly a fin-de-siècle private officers’ casino—provide a historically charged architectural frame for this polymath artist. Since the mid-1970s, chance has informed his practice which extends across performance, film, video, photography, drawing, painting, sculpture, assemblage, and now through his current use of reconstructed industrial materials.

Upon entering the exhibition, the viewer is surrounded by monitors playing early performances for film and video. In the hand-colored film Zu einer Semiologie der Sinne [On a Semiology of the Senses] (1976), the artist sits at a table with a liter bottle of wine, a glass, an ashtray, and a seemingly endless supply of cigarettes. A classical-yet-carnivalesque soundtrack offsets his Alphaville look. The scene pulls you in, alternating between pathos, irony, and discomfort, especially when he vomits into a nearby bucket. The gesture remains unresolved when he lights another cigarette and refills his glass.

Even at his grittiest, Polanszky often refers to Greek mythology. This hand-colored film suggests Dionysus punishing Sisyphus, while a second performance on the opposite wall heightens the dark humor. Seen from behind, the artist doggedly plays the cello (without formal training) with his shaved head painted red. The instrument seems to moan as much as sing, turning the act of playing into a stubborn, partly-comic ordeal. Titled Cello, AKA Music for Dieter Roth (1985–89), the video becomes both an homage to Polanszky’s close friend and a string solo of ironic overtones and otherworldly blues.

The laughter these works may trigger is already tragic. Much of it ran deliberately counter to the grain of the dominant European art movements of the time: Art Informel, Actionism, Conceptual art, and the nostalgia of the Transavantgarde. The connection between this early work and his later production lies in opposition and collision. He resisted or satirized the surrounding styles, unsettling some of their claims. For example, apply the premise of Art Informel to the iconic film Sprungfederzeichnungen [Spring Notation] (1983). For the performance, he built a spring chair to traverse the studio and film frame, then sprang again with a loaded brush to mark a waiting scroll-like sheet of paper. The resulting work is less a conventional painting than an unstable, entropic musical score. Yet, it fulfills a checklist of elements associated with the brushy poetry of Art Informel and the prevailing strand of Austrian art at the time.

Considering that it may seem contradictory, such an unexpected turn toward abstraction became, in Polanszky’s case, a hybrid form, or as he calls it, an ad-hoc synthesis. After 1995, this development led to his interpretive use of industrial materials, plastics, metals, and wire in his “Reconstructions,” which he at times exposed to the elements to be further shaped by nature’s whims. The metals were sourced from printing supplies—thin remnants of surplus rolls disconnected from their origin, along with printer’s inks, which reduced the CMYK palette to mostly magenta (or sparse cyans and yellows). This detachment serves as an abstraction, void of narrative, rather than as a classically reductive image. It is unusually free of material or cultural baggage and in the service of a singular pursuit of freedom closer to mathematics, physics, or philosophy than to art history.

What first appears as a duality between object and image, gradually reveals itself as a continuity in Polanszky’s method. The instability of the early filmed performances reappears in the paintings, where the surface becomes an active mechanism rather than a passive ground. Reflection unsettles the work from within. Instead of receiving paint as a stable support, the ground resists closure, refusing any fixed or final image (photography is particularly difficult).

The exhibition culminates in the grand salon, where twelve large works—including selections from the “Chimera,” “Dark Mirrors,” and “Apeiron” series—surround the central Overlay Sculpture (2015). At 76 by 131 by 39 inches, the sculpture nearly dwarfs the paintings around it. Made of copper, fiberglass, acrylic, glass, and plastics, with a metal base, its bent-metal planes hover overhead. Some tremble. It is monumental, yet oddly weightless, as if engineered by Daedalus himself. The work reads as a metaphysical apparatus caught between ascent and entrapment, escaping and repeating the labyrinths made by kings, monsters, and artists. Yet its grandeur is never solemn. Myth is the core of Polanszky’s play. Slapstick becomes archetypal, and the spiritual remains describable only through deadpan delivery, as if Diogenes himself were delivering the punch-line.