ART CITIES: Vienna-Julius von Bismarck

Spanning a wide range of forms (from kinetic sculptures and photographs to video installations and landscapes) Julius von Bismarck’s work is produced in an intense engagement with the world and the physical conditions that determine existence on the planet. His work treats the natural world as a laboratory, a studio or sometimes even as a kind of canvas. Employing optical illusion, elaborate tromp l’oeil or incongruous action, his works can confound viewers, allowing them to experience the world and their place in it from a reoriented perspective.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Kunst Haus Wien Archive

At the core of Julius von Bismarck’s practice is the question of how the notion of Nature was constructed: specifically, how the conceptual split stipulated by man from his surroundings, through naming, classifying and creating systems, has gone hand in hand with control and domination of the environment, to increasingly disastrous effects, not just for nature itself but as a consequence of wider notions of humanity’s sovereignty, also for the lives of other beings, human and non-human. The exhibition “Normale Katastrophe (Normality Bias)” with works created in the middle of natural forces, addresses human hubris, responsibility and agency.  The title “Normale Katastrophe (Normality Bias) describes the state of a society continuously stricken by multiple crises, with far-reaching and unprecedented ecological and social changes becoming the new normality. In powerful images facilitated by technological inventions and radical experimental settings, the artist scrutinizes human perception. The resulting photographs, video works, sculptures and installations are visually stunning and do not shy away from grand gestures. Along with a selection of cross-media works from the last fifteen years, a series of new photographic works will be on show. For the Kunst Haus Wien’s greened inner courtyard Julius von Bismarck has also created a site-specific intervention. Julius von Bismarck’s artistic research is oriented on action, with his works often emerging out of direct, physical engagement with the forces of nature. For “Talking to Thunder” (2016–2017) – one of the two central work complexes featured in the exhibition – the artist followed lightning storms to investigate the phenomenon in minute detail. This pursuit led him to research labs in the US, a remote part of Venezuela renowned for its frequent severe electrical storms and shamans in Colombia. He even developed a special device to capture lightning bolts and channel them to the ground – powerful photographs and an installation tell of these encounters and experiments. The second central work complex, “Fire with Fire” (2018–2020), and the series of new photographic “The Day the Ocean Turned Black” created in early 2025 in the aftermath of the devastating Los Angeles fires, revolve around the element of fire as both a destructive and a regenerative force. The works contradict the familiar aesthetics of disasters as they are represented in media reports: through slow motion, image mirroring and thoughtful composition, hypnotic images emerge capturing and conveying the duality of fire – on the one hand a destructive elementary power, on the other a tool to dominate nature and the engine driving human ecological power. Julius von Bismarck’s site-specific intervention in the courtyard takes up this theme. Rotating LED lights convey the impression that single trees are engulfed in flames – a spellbinding and equally irritating game with our perception.

For “Punishment” (2011–2012) the artist lashes symbolically-charged landscapes in acts at once brutal and meditative. In the work exhibited he futilely fights the roaring sea until exhaustion. Here Julius von Bismarck is referring to the anecdote about the Persian king Xerxes, who sought to punish the sea by whipping it, and reflects the notion that nature can be influenced or indeed controlled. The natural force of the sea is also the theme of the video work “Den Himmel muss man sich wegdenken”(2014). Presented in a large projection, a giant wave swells and rises during a storm, resembling a monochrome massif. At first barely perceptible, it rolls towards the viewer in extreme slow-motion, generating a feeling that is equally meditative and threatening. Filmed with a highspeed camera in the middle of a storm off the coast of Ireland, the work starkly evokes the sense of human powerlessness when faced with the forces of nature. For the photographs of “Landscape Painting (Bismarck Sea, Volcano)” (2023) Julius von Bismarck let a large cloth imprinted with a rippling wave structure drift across the Bismarck Sea. The resulting photographic work shows the landscape overlaid with an image of itself, reflecting how (colonial) pictorial traditions continue to determine our perception of the world and landscapes. The works assembled in the exhibition deal with traditional images and narratives about nature: nature as a romanticized idyll, as an economic resource or as a vengeful, almost divine authority. Julius von Bismarck counters these ideas with new images, disconcertingly beautiful and contemplative in character – with the result that they almost make us forget the enormous power of nature and the immense physical commitment required to produce them. They enable us to sense and discern the extent to which our perception of nature is culturally molded. As the artist has put it: “In my view, what we think about nature or how we understand nature is strongly informed by images – when nature is represented in an image it’s called a landscape. I try to destroy the old, conventionalized images and create new ones.” In this sense, von Bismarck is less interested in explanation than in transformation. His practice opens visual and sensory spaces where inherited ways of seeing collapse and new perspectives emerge. By immersing audiences in encounters with lightning, fire, ocean, and storm, “Normale Katastrophe (Normality Bias)” becomes more than an exhibition: it is an invitation to reconsider the fragile entanglement of humans and environment, and to imagine forms of coexistence beyond domination.

Photo: Julius von Bismarck, Punishment, 2011, Courtesy: Julius von Bismarck; Esther Schipper, Berlin, Paris, Seoul; alexander levy, Berlin; Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf © Julius von Bismarck, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025

Info: Curator: Sophie Halsinger, Kunst Haus Wien, Untere Weißgerberstraße 13, Untere Weißgerberstraße 13, Vienna, Austria, Duration: 10/9/2025-8/9/2026, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-18:00, www.kunsthauswien.com/