VIENNA.- The exhibition 'Marina Faust: Ambulant # 05' is now on view since March 8th and will continue to 15 October 2023 as part of the series CARLONE CONTEMPORARY at the Upper Belvedere. The Austrian artist and photographer Marina Faust shows as part of the series CARLONE CONTEMPORARY a mobile light sculpture constructed by harnessing an intentionally improperly reassembled chandelier within a moving metal frame. The Belvedere collection's latest acquisition stands out for its elegance, agility, and wit.

General Director and Curator Stella Rollig: "Marina Faust's object flirts aesthetically with the bourgeois norms of classicism, but transposes them into a new frame of reference that alludes to industrial mass production. Carlo Innocenzo Carlone's Baroque allegorical ceiling fresco lends the sculpture the added meaning of light as a reference to knowledge and enlightenment."

Marina Faust explores and reconfigures everyday found objects such as chairs, stools, and chandeliers in her sculptural practice. She investigates their function, materiality, and history with curiosity and playful exploration and questions the social codes they convey – it is nothing less than the essence of things that she seeks to uncover and decipher. By combining everyday articles into art objects, she redefines their meaning and potential use in a collage-like manner. Equipping discarded chairs and stools with castors and supposed historical illuminants with mobile frames, she raises questions of autonomy, sovereignty, and mobility.

Marina Faust: “In my most recent series “ambulants” various historical periods clash with each other. The “ambulants” are constructed with parts of old chandeliers and vintage lights. Conservative rules are ignored and the usual static position of chandeliers is subverted and pulled down to human height. Industrial prosthetic frames on wheels serve them to be mobile and autonomous. Coming from photography, my work is mainly related to movement and light. As in my collage works with paper, based on existing materials, all of it is an ongoing flux of deconstruction and reconstruction.”

Marina Faust

In a career spanning over forty years Marina Faust has developed a multifaceted, multimedia oeuvre that seamlessly blends photography with video, collage, performance, and sculpture. With a background in photojournalism and documentary photography, she worked with design icon Martin Margiela for over twenty years. Her recent solo exhibitions include Gianni Manhattan, Vienna; Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; Galerie Xippas, Geneva; and Le Consortium, Dijon. She most recently participated in group exhibitions at the mumok (Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien), Belvedere 21, and Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna and the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. In 2019, she received the prestigious Otto Breicha Award for Artistic Photography. Marina Faust was born in Vienna in 1950. She lives and works in Vienna and Paris.

The CARLONE CONTEMPORARY series presents contemporary works in the Carlone Hall of the Upper Belvedere. From the frescoed ancient world of the deities Apollo and Diana to the present day, contemporary artists bridge the Baroque pictorial program with new artistic stances.