Johannes Girardoni

Early life

Girardoni grew up in on the outskirts of a rural Austrian-Hungarian border village just outside Vienna. He and his family then emigrated to the US State of California in 1982 at the age of fourteen. According to Klara Stima of Art Magazin, "his early impressions were influenced by the Hungarian landscape". Between 1985 and 1989 he earned a BA majoring in both History and Art at Bowdoin College, in the State of Maine. During his training at Bowdoin, Girardoni was also a guest artist at the Media Lab at MIT. In a 2011 interview, Professor of Art A. LeRoy Greason at Bowdoin spoke of the arc of Girardoni's career since, noting that over time it had, "[grown] from very elegant sculptural wall objects ... to multi-media installations that incorporate sound and light, painting over large-format photos."

1990s

Girardoni's first influences included Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Jasper Johns. He began working in two dimensions, but soon moved to three. At first this was done with the help of a sculpting knife, but eventually he moved to painting three dimensional surfaces instead, and began to utilize wax as a binding agent for his colour pigments in order to achieve his desired effects. Many of the three dimensional surfaces he used were made of found wood that he gathered during urban explorations that he pursued at night. His first professional exhibition was held in 1991 after his work was noticed by art curator Friedhelm Mennekes, and by 1994 his third exhibition (he was 27 at the time) was called "impressive" and "elegant" in ARTNews Magazine.

2000s

In 2003 Girardoni exhibited alongside 15 other artists from 11 countries in the Personal Structures travelling art exhibition founded by artist René Rietmeyer and art historian Peter Lodermeyer. In 2004, Tracey Hummer of Art in America magazine noted that Girardoni's work has created of "straightforward contrast of materials: the fabricated and the found". His work also includes site specific installations and sculptures.

In 2006 Lodermeyer described Girardoni's work as "virtually the opposite of Minimalism". Grace Glueck of the New York Times described a 2003 exhibition of his as "Minimalist slabs of smooth wax in rich monochromes, contrastingly placed in settings of no-color weathered wood or raw metal". Girardoni has also exhibited his work in offbeat locations. For example, in 2008 Girardoni was a part of the Origins exhibition sponsored by the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art at a vacant storefront on Main Street in downtown Peekskill, New York. The artist has also worked in a diversity of mediums other than wood, wax-based paints, and installation—his alternate works include the 2009 film 7 Minutes 20 Seconds, which he produced with Australian film and television editor Astrid Steiner for the Austrian Cultural Forum's exhibition Creative Migration.

2010s

In 2011, a Girardoni exhibited at PDX Contemporary Art in Portland, Oregon and its adjacent PDX Across the Hall gallery, hanging his minimal work in one gallery and photographs of billboards that were overlaid with obscuring shapes in the other. In the exhibition, the artist used a tension between concave and convex angles to create optical illusions, as well as other directional tips to trigger the peripheral vision of the viewer. The billboard side of the exhibit was described by Lisa Radon of Art Ltd Magazine as images "layered with digitally created double exposures ... overlaid with screened-back blocks of color and painted forms that echo those of the billboard's outlines, transforming oddball roadside photos into architectural studies in form." His work was also exhibited at the 54th Venice Biennale at the end of that year. In early 2012, his work was exhibited at the Tomlinson Kong Contemporary in New York City.

Collections, Exhibitions, and Books

A book on his work entitled Johannes Girardoni was released in 2007 on the publisher Lukas Feichtner Editions, and his work has also been feature in the 2005 book Personal Structures. Collections that include pieces by Girardoni include the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, and the Progressive Art Collection in Cleveland, Ohio.