Secession, one of Vienna’s most innovative—and oldest—contemporary art spaces, has a history of mounting simultaneous three-person exhibitions by disparate artists. Featuring nearly 15 international talents each year, all of whom have a penchant for experimentation, the gallery’s program is selected by an advisory board with an all-star roster of artists and curators, among them Wolfgang Ganter of Gelitin, Christo, Georg Baselitz, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. The latest trio they’ve chosen, for shows that run through February 5, 2012, comprises the Los Angeles–based Lecia Dole-Recio, Hungarian-born Attila Csörgo, and Croatian-born David Maljkovic.

Attila Csörgo reveals phenomena we can’t often see, such as motion or energy, by way of photography, video, and film. Using cardboard, tape, and other simple materials—along with big ideas like science, mathematics, and the elements—Csörgo experiments with ways to reveal these processes to the naked eye. One of his standout pieces is the photographic series Spherical Vortex I – III, four shots with different camera exposures that capture the path of a flashlight bulb, made by connecting three separate spinning movements of different velocities. The results are otherworldly spheres of light made visible against a black background.

Lecia Dole-Recio, "Untitled" (2010). Photo: Fredrik Nilsen, courtesy of Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles.

For Dole-Recio’s first time exhibiting in Austria, she’s debuting a recent body of work that blends collage, drawing, and painting to produce kinetic abstractions evoked through the use of positive and negative space. While the compositions call to mind architectural structures, it’s only Dole-Recio’s canvases themselves that venture into three dimensions: They’re built up in layers of studio scraps, spills, and discarded remains of previous paintings, plus a mixture of glue, paper, cardboard, paint, and parchment. At Secession, pieces in a variety of sizes incorporate circular forms in green, red, and blue hues.

David Maljkovic, "Retired Form" (2008). Photo: Courtesy of the artist and Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam; Georg Kargl, Vienna; Metro Pictures, New York; and Sprueth Magers, Berlin, London.

David Maljkovic’s photomontages, videos, and installations insert anachronistic objects like crystals and modernist sculptures into landscapes that are both reminiscent of a time gone by and imagined from an era yet to come, creating the artist’s version of a utopian fantasy. Many of these surreal worlds represent his attempts to reconcile the fractured political and social systems he grew up with in Cold War-era Yugoslavia. For his exhibition at Secession, the gallery space becomes a kind of showroom for Maljkovic to reimagine ideas from prior exhibitions. He’s repurposed earlier artworks through interventions or subtractions, like one piece that’s no more than an empty display case from a 2009 gallery exhibition of his, minus the piece that once stood inside it.

Secession Vienna
Title image: Attila Csörgo, "Occurence Graphs III" (1998). Photo: József Rosta, courtesy of the artist and Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin-Ljubljana.