Florian Pumhösl (born 1971) is a contemporary artist based in Vienna, mainly known for his works that employ abstract visual language to reflect on the diverse manifestations of modernity.
"[3] Often taking the form of a series, his works span a wide range of media, including films, installations, objects, and glass paintings.
[5] Through the selection, reduction, rearrangement, and reproduction of his source materials—unsystematic and subjective modes of transcription—Pumhösl reveals that the modernist fantasy of self-referentiality was always haunted by irreducible specificity and cultural instability.
de Bruyn has observed that the "perceptual ambivalence" in Pumhösl's work "merges an aesthetic and conceptual critique of the pictorial language of modernism in one gesture.
Consisting of a film, a book, Pumhösl's Eetkamer glass paintings, and a correspondent exhibition, the project examined Pre-Columbian cotton lace from Chacay civilization, central coast of Peru (900-1532); a Picture clock (c. 1830); F. Percy Smith's film Fight for the Dardanelles (1915); László Moholy-Nagy's Schwarz-rotes Gleichgewicht (1922); the Bauhaus traveling exhibition installed by Hannes Meyer (1929); Georges Vantongerloo's Untitled (3 Concrete Studies) (c. 1931); and the former St. Gallen Public Warehouse erected in the beginning of the 20th century by Robert Maillart, and where the Neue Kunsthalle is now housed.
The book, Animated Map, was published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König in 2007, with texts by Peiro Aguirre, Burkhard Meltzer and Florian Pumhösl.
For the project, Pumhösl identified and expressed in a formal vocabulary a reciprocal exchange between the German, Russian, and Japanese avant-gardes in the interwar period.
Parallel to the exhibition, Pumhösl also co-organized the re-installation of classical modern art on Level 8 of the museum with the title "Abstract Space" with curator Matthias Michalka.
However, unlike Moholy-Nagy, who delegated the task of his telephone pictures to a firm, Pumhösl applied the formal effects to his panel himself through a cliché stamp.