Living together for more than 40 years, Brigitte Prinzgau and Wolfgang Podgorschek’s work in fine art, film, design, architecture, and intervention transcends genres.
Artistic work knows no regular hours nor self-contained spaces. Everyday life and activities, work, and resting all coalesce, anything can be an inspiration: “In general, we are not finished,” say Brigitte Prinzgau and Wolfgang Podgorschek, whose oeuvre ranges from art in public space to architecture, design, object art, installation, photography, and film, to drawing and painting. PRINZpod considers the unfinished to be the primary form of evolving productivity. This openness is also manifested in their cinematic oeuvre, which adheres neither to genre boundaries nor to dramaturgical rules.
In the most reduced case, one take and one sound (SOUSTOPIE, 2016) suffice, or a shallow joke becomes a gesture (in the gas station short film NORMAL VOLL). A presence-focused plot also dominates DYADIK PIER (1994/2023): In partially overexposed images and accompanied by minimalist-ominous music, there are cables put up, a ladder is leaned against a house, and hair is cut.
Other works interweave the levels of the visual and the discursive. In GLOBE (2024), random structures are created from colorful strings, while the voiceover text criticizes the international community’s paralysis. One question might be what do PRINZpod deal with. The easier one to answer is what they don’t. DIE PEDIANTEN (1989) presents the invention of a means of transport, which, driven by deviation and mechanics, is rushing through a box architecture as an animated clone.
The joy of the hybrid also becomes evident in INOTEN (1991). In a mixture of Western and art film, it satirizes art criticism and simultaneously documents artistic production. The worries about a devoured planet are only logical.
The visual worlds of PRINZpod evade unambiguousness. They start, they stop; the film titles are enigmatic; even the camera is willful, with images fading into each other. It is only logical within this praxis of focused casualness that to the artist duo, the question of which of them eventually puts their signature under a particular work is irrelevant. (Anna Katharina Laggner)
PRINZpod
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