Marcus Geiger, 'Project 2 for Erste Campus', 2014-2016

Painting, Building façades at Wiedner Gürtel Nos. 2 to 10

In his artistic intervention for the Erste Campus, Marcus Geiger has playfully “portrayed” the character, objectives, effects, and outward – radiating vibrancies of day-to-day activities in the building—and for this “portrait” he employed paint, as that most original medium of art. Geiger had the façades of the row of buildings directly opposite the Erste Campus on the other side of Wiedner Gürtel “renovated” in the respective pastel hues of the seven Euro bank notes, thus effectively visualizing the Erste Campus’s shimmering shadow. The painting of these colors onto buildings, rather than onto canvas, is reminiscent of the underlying concept of the bank notes’ design, which was to symbolically depict cultural eras in the form of certain archetypical buildings as symbols of specific periods of European history. The coloration of the individual façades does not correspond in any way to their respective ownership and likewise ignores existing building edges.

Geiger’s intervention thus calls accustomed perspectives into question. While conventional art in architecture projects are defined by the imagined view of the building and its representative art from the outside on, Geiger’s project demands to be understood from the inside out and hence in terms of the Erste Campus occupants’ view of the spatial, temporal, and social relationships within which they perform their work. Moreover, the glass façades of the Erste Campus, through their reflectivity, make their own contribution to the reflexive diversity of possible perspectives and modes of seeing.

Marcus Geiger was born in Muri, Switzerland in 1957. He lives and works in Vienna. Marcus Geiger became known internationally for projects that alter the perception of urban and institutional space by exposing crowded-out, suppressed, and overlooked relationships and orders, and he has realized such projects at Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana, the Vienna Secession, the social housing project Brauerei Liesing, and the 6th Berlin Biennale. Works by Geiger have also been shown at venues including Vienna’s 21er Haus, Kunsthaus Zürich, the Kunstverein in Munich, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, and the Bawag and Generali Foundation in Vienna.

Text: Kathrin Rhomberg & Pierre Bal-Blanc