On top of the Salzburg Mönchsberg is one of James Turrell's great “Sky Spaces”, where nature and art become one through an opening in the ceiling of heavenly plays of clouds and light.
Down in the old town, in the late Romanesque crypt of the cathedral, Christian Boltanski installed the mystical shadow play “Vanitas” in 2009.
Both works are based on the worthwhile “Walk of Modern Art”, which a private initiative launched twenty years ago to furnish Salzburg's public space with art.
Later, the Würth Collection took over the works of Marina Abramović, Stephan Balkenhol, Mario Merz and the others and set up a sculpture garden at Arenberg Castle.
This year, many galleries are also dedicating their exhibitions to plastic works during the festival season. Welz reminds us of Fritz Wotruba, the artist and also the teacher of an entire generation who shaped this pioneer of Austrian sculpture after 1945. Wotruba's own oeuvre was based on the image of man, from the classical figure, which he increasingly abstracted, finally condensed into complexes of tubes and especially cubes (bronzes from 30,000, drawings from 4600 euros). According to Wotruba's method, his students also had to find their own way from the classically figurative. Some let the teacher model flow into it. Others moved further away, such as Joannis Avramidis with his multi-axis, softly contoured torsos (bronzes from 55,000, drawings from 12.000 euros to) or Alfred Hrdlicka with tortured bodies in expressive realism (from 3900 euros to). (Until September 4th).
A stronger contrast to the design carried out by the manual artist in the studio than the working method of Donald Judd is hardly conceivable. The Thaddaeus Ropac gallery shows the minimalist who limited himself to the basic geometric shapes, to cuboids and cubes - and who above all avoided any personal signature by entrusting highly specialized handicrafts with the production of monochrome wall and floor objects made of wood, aluminum and plexiglass . At Ropac, who has represented Judd's estate together with the Zwirner gallery for two years, there are two large cadmium-red floor works with an aluminum insert from 1990 that want no more, but also no less, than about the relationship between color and shape and form and space to reflect ($ 1.5 million each).Judd's elegant, partially open wall cuboids lined with colored Plexiglas ($ 950,000) on the inside also pursue this intention. (Until August 28th).
It is a highlight that Ropac is currently able to present one of the last available bottle dryer models by Marcel Duchamp, which is brilliantly staged in its own room; Another "Porte-bouteilles", which belonged to Robert Rauschenberg, he gave in 2018 to the Art Institute of Chicago. Duchamp's concept of declaring industrially manufactured products to be art is one of the prerequisites for Judd's work. And in the large hall on Vilniusstrasse, Ropac gives the meter-high marble cucumbers, marble sausages and marble rolls by Erwin Wurm plenty of space.