My exhibition concept for the Austrian Pavilion – Venice Biennale 2017, features two internationally highly successful Austrian artists: Erwin Wurm and Brigitte Kowanz – both recipients of the Austrian State Prize, with numerous solo exhibitions in the most important art centres from Paris to New York, whose works are held in significant museum and private collections. Over the past decades, both have developed important Austrian contributions to international movements. Brigitte Kowanz has immaterially expanded the concept of the image through her light artworks. She creates light objects, light installations, light spaces, light architecture. Erwin Wurm has materially expanded the concept of sculpture. He has given a major impetus to the performative turn – the transformation of art objects into forms of action and the expansion of the concept of sculpture across media. Wurm creates sculpture-performances, sculpture-installations, spatial sculptures and architectural sculptures. In his work, sculpture becomes

architecture and action and media notation. What connects Wurm and Kowanz is the relationship of the image or sculpture to architecture. Through her light installations, Kowanz has redefined public space and architecture in an immaterial way. Wurm, with his famous house paraphrases, from Narrow House to House Attack, has transformed sculpture into architecture. The Austrian Pavilion has repeatedly become the subject of architectural metamorphoses, the subject of artistic and architectural reflections. The two artists I have selected have demonstrated through their work that each is capable in their own specific way of setting new accents in this tradition and of providing artistically convincing surprises. Kowanz and Wurm work at the forefront of international avant-garde movements, because they have accomplished the expansion into architecture and the participation of the audience in both the medium of sculpture and the medium of the image.