Gerald Matt

Gerald Matt is an Austrian curator, author and as the director of the Vienna Art Institute, a privately financed cultural and social think tank, he is responsible for a monthly TV talk with interesting personalities from the cultural, social and political field. He is associate professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the CIAM (Center of International Art Management) in Cologne and he lectures art theory at the Institute of Art History at the University of Innsbruck. From 1996 to 2012 Gerald Matt was director of Kunsthalle Vienna, an institution for international contemporary and modern Art. Matt published several books on art and museum management, among them Artists talk (2014), Österreichs Kunst der 60er Jahre: Gespräche (2011), Kommentare zu Kunst, Kultur und Politik (2006) or Kunst und Geld, Das Museum, ein Unternehmen (2001).

Ulrike Ottinger im Interview mit Gerald A. Matt und Verena Konrad

Gerald Matt, Verena Konrad, 2012
CONVERSATION
27.11.2024
EN DE

Das Schöne und Groteske sind für mich unlösbar miteinander verknüpft. Deshalb setze ich sie gerne nebeneinander oder miteinander ins Bild. Denn erst dadurch wird deutlich, dass Schönheit, wie Karl Rosenkranz geschrieben hat, aus dem Hässlichen entspringt und Ergebnis eines Prozesses ist, der allen Makel vom Alltäglichen abzieht. Schönheit ist zuallererst Wunschbild, dann Kunstbild, und manchmal taucht sie in der Wirklichkeit auf, weil wir sie suchen und finden.

Ulrike Ottinger in Conversation with Gerald A. Matt and Verena Konrad

Gerald Matt, Verena Konrad, 2012
CONVERSATION
27.11.2024
EN DE

For me, the beautiful and the grotesque are inseparably linked. That is why I like to juxtapose or combine them in an image. For only this can make it clear, as Karl Rosenkranz wrote, that beauty arises from the ugly as the result of a process that removes all flaws from the everyday. Beauty is primarily an ideal, then an image in art, and sometimes it occurs in reality, because we look for it and find it.