Gelitinʼs Sculpture for Bathroom is in reality a dispatch, and namely one of utmost urgency concerning the immediate experience of artistic processes.

In spring 2013, Gelitin, (namely Wolfgang Gantner, Ali Janka, Florian Reither and Tobias Urban), delivered a six-day performance in the 21er Haus, one of Viennaʼs most tradition-rich museum spaces, a masterwork of superior spatial acquisition. Thereby the artists concluded, once and for all, bagatelles like international minimal art, as well as Situationism, the alpine in general, and particularly sculpture, the performative, procedural, and the participatory, Grunge, Death Metal, Rock and piano pieces, exhibition architecture and organic food. 

The raw material consisted of Styrofoam and plaster. Styrofoam in the form of a massive minimalist architecture block eight meters cubed, that rose in the light-flooded hall of the steel-frame construction, almost reaching to the ceiling. Up top cavorted a rope team consisting of Gelitin and climbing-able colleagues who bored through the mass with hot wire machines and, little by little, carried it away. The ʻnegative spaceʼ was filled with plaster. For a more comfortable removal of sculptures from the matrix, found objects from the barrens of global flea-markets were put to use. The civilizing, mismatched pieces had their presentation as playful grotesques, carried by the synchronicity of the real and the absurd, from satyrical strength and the courage to become extraordinary.  Cheered on by elated fans and enraptured grade schoolers, Gelitin lowered the brilliant looking accidental sculptures with ropes – also the feminist example that today is in the evn collection – a fetching hatstand with a pink hand towel. 

Having grown up in the time of punk, the artists in Gelitin implement provocative appearance, non-conforming behavior, and gently spring-loaded rebellion to get away with routines that their ilk are looking for. Their medium is manifold and has nothing to do with the long outdated cross-over of the 90s. Gelitin love the cross-reference between painting, sculpture and rock, between architecture and sports, between performance and fashion, between event and discourse. The result belongs, in all likelihood, to the most exciting that art has to offer because the gang holds their audience in thrall with projects that the world has not yet seen. Weʼre happy to be there.

Brigitte Huck, 2015 (translation: Virginia Dellenbaugh)