VIENNA.- Things, a work by German sculptor and media artist Asta Gröting, concludes the series of exhibitions CARLONE CONTEMPORARY at the Upper Belvedere, which General Director Stella Rollig initiated in 2018 and has curated ever since. It is the first show in the series to feature a video installation.

Seemingly random things float upward in an unpredictable sequence against a brilliant blue summer sky—gravity has been suspended. The video Things features sixteen organic and inorganic objects that soar in slow motion through the air in a high arc. In the CARLONE CONTEMPORARY exhibition series, they take over the sky in the Baroque ceiling fresco by Carlo Innocenzo Carlone.

The relationships between people, animals, and things are recurring themes in Asta Gröting’s multimedia practice. Her works draw attention to what is invisible to the naked eye and her sculptures, videos, and performances give form to social and psychological states. Things from 2018 focuses with unswerving intensity on the vast variety of objects that surrounds us in our daily lives. By extending their movements in time and viewing them from below, she reveals moments that otherwise escape our fleeting perception.

General director and curator Stella Rollig: Asta Gröting grants us a moment of lightness. For a few seconds, things lose their weight and their usual order. With gravity seemingly suspended, we see the familiar with fresh eyes—detached from customary functions and open to new meanings. The video Things compellingly translates sculptural questions into film and its possibilities.





In the Baroque Carlone Hall, the video encounters the illusionistic ceiling fresco and offers visitors an unusual perspective on the material world and its significance. As each object moves in slow motion, uniquely transformed against a brilliant blue summer sky, the suspense builds as to what will appear next.

Asta Gröting’s multimedia practice has intertwined sculptural principles with film since the 1990s. She sees time as a malleable, elastic material, and the camera as her instrument for making the fleeting visible to the human eye and the familiar seem alien. Her work revolves around relationships—whether between humans, animals, things, or spaces. She consistently links personal experience with socially relevant themes.

Asta Gröting, born in 1961 in Herford (DE), lives and works in Berlin.

Solo exhibitions (selection): Städel Museum, Frankfurt a. M.; Centre Pasquart, Biel Bienne; KINDL—Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin; ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Berlin; Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz; Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; and MARTa Herford.

Contributions to major international exhibitions (selection): Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris; Fundación Juan March, Madrid; James-Simon-Galerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; Kunsthalle Bielefeld; 22nd Bienal de São Paulo; 8th and 14th Biennale of Sydney; and 44th Venice Biennale. Asta Gröting’s works are in the following public collections: Städel Museum, Frankfurt a. M.; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Hamburger Bahnhof—Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others..