Bernhard Leitner

"My works are instruments to create and change space through sound. They allow and require specific sound movements, a specific way of defining space. Just as different pieces are written for a conventional sound instrument, so different spatial programs and sound programs can be created for each SOUND: SPACE instrument." (Bernhard Leitner, New York 1977)

For more than five decades, Bernhard Leitner has dedicated himself to the idea of sculpturally shaping and forming space with sound – its movement, frequency, timbre, and volume. As early as 1969, upon moving from Vienna to New York, where he would live until 1982, he recorded his first theoretical considerations on sound-space sculptures in drawings and notes. It was here that the trained architect, whose thinking is influenced by New Music as well as classical and contemporary dance and visual arts, began to understand sound as a building material.

In his major solo exhibition SOUNDSPACESCULPTURE, Bernhard Leitner presents a new large-scale work, which he developed for this occasion, in the context of some selected works. The show thus offers the opportunity to engage with Leitner's artistic work and most important research questions and to perceive his sculptural sound architectures or sonic spatial drawings not only acoustically, but holistically physically. As a pioneer of Sound Art, Leitner has had a lasting impact on subsequent generations of artists. This exhibition spans a wide arc from early theoretical investigations in sketches, photographs, and graphics, to significant works on the idea of "body hearing", to a new work created for the Secession – Water Cube / Wall Waves (2026). The underlying idea of the work can be linked to the Soundcube designed as early as 1969 – a purely theoretical model at the time of a cube equipped with multiple loudspeakers. Already in these early drawings, Leitner sketched possibilities to spatially organize sound. Many of the ideas formulated back then – sound lines, horizontal and vertical, pendulum, arching, guiding sound movements – still form a vocabulary that the artist continuously develops.

In the Water Cube, water sounds precisely choreographed traverse a loudspeaker system attached to PVC hoses within a monumental spatial cube. In this 48-channel sound-space composition, short and long lines and waves are drawn in space in changing rhythms. With the geometric form of the cube, Leitner responds to the architecture-defining grid of the exhibition space, which structures the terrazzo floor, glass ceiling, and cassette doors alike. Above the central skylight, eight loudspeakers are installed along the edge, creating a homogeneous horizontal acoustic surface, which in turn is intersected by a vertical sound axis from the glass ceiling to the floor in front of the Water Cube.

The Sound Couch (sound-space composition from 1975, sculptural execution 2022) shown at the Secession shifts hearing directly onto and into the resting body, through which the sounds of two loudspeakers travel. This work makes it immediately clear that we hear sound not only through the ear, but with the entire body – here it is the flowing movement between a sound source in the chest area and one in the foot area, a phenomenon that the artist calls "body hearing". In Pulsating Silence 2 (2026), three sets of two parallel hanging metal plates are each equipped with a loudspeaker; these emit deep frequencies (75-84-92 Hertz) that are not or barely audible from the outside, whose bass-heavy vibrations create a pulsating space perceived when passing through. In Sound Rays (2026), sound rays emanating from the center of parabolic dishes are redirected by metal plates (the reflectors) and are finally perceptible as "acoustic images" on walls where there is no sound source. Leitner has designed an artistic intervention for the space of Gustav Klimt's Beethoven Frieze (1902), which functions similarly. From a parabolic dish installed here, four high-pitched sound rays are cast onto the ceiling and into the room.

For his works, Leitner draws on a sound library that has grown over decades. This includes noises, spoken language, and recordings of acoustic instruments, which are digitally processed. His works do not aim for detached observation but demand physical presence. Sound surrounds the body as much as it penetrates it. This fundamentally questions the familiar separation of inside and outside; the question of where the body ends and space begins remains deliberately open. Leitner's art thus invites us to understand architecture and sculpture not as a static form, but as a changeable structure that reshapes itself with every movement of the body and every sound event. Or as the artist describes it in conversation with curator Jeanette Pacher:

"When I did my first investigations with the body starting in 1972/73, it became clear to me that it is much more complex when you talk about acoustic space. That goes far beyond the physical concept of calculating a concert hall. It is an elementary experience that we constantly have, but are not always aware of. That's where all the enigmatic and wonderful aspects of space and acoustics begin: when you don't just look at them physically, but in their full complexity."