The Battles of Form against the Clouds and the Birds and the Fire

Josef Strau is one of the most unconventional artists of his generation. For many years, he lived and worked in Cologne, Mexico City, and New York before returning to Vienna. His work encompasses painting, sculpture, film, architecture and literature, and thus often defies clear categorization within any single medium.

At the heart of Strau’s artistic practice lies the question of what it actually means to him to produce art. Since the late 1980s, he has been developing forms of what he calls a “nonproductive attitude,” through which he avoids the notion of continuous artistic productivity and the cultural values inherent in the art world. For him, not only the act of creating, but also collecting, discarding, revisiting, writing, and exhibiting are transformed into independent artistic acts. In doing so, he experimentally explores a sort of metaphysics of self-generating, self-contained narratives of production — such as the “Hypostasizisms” he invented. “Hypostasis” refers to the manifestation or embodiment of an idea or spiritual principle in a concrete, material form — here, it describes the notion that thoughts can materialize through simple physical processes and experiments.