It is the perfect idyll: The small town of Höflein in the snow mountain area in Lower Austria is surrounded by lush green forests and meadows on which cows graze. The pilgrimage church of Maria Kirchbüchl. And in the distance, the picturesque rock walls of the high wall complete the postcard image.
Since the end of 2024, however, there has been a foreign body in the rural Ensemble: A eight-meter-high, strictly geometric exposed concrete block, built from finished parts, which enables solar and shadow games inside the building with generously dimensioned windows and three skull strips. The studio, the name of which X2732 a little after the robots from the Star-Wars-Films sounds (in truth only to the postcode of the town of Höflein) is equally studio, exhibition room and discourse zone.
The Mascha and Stuart Veech building, a couple who operates the architectural firm Veech X Veech in Vienna, have planned, built and largely financed themselves. With its architectural intervention, which was taken in the region quite benevolently, they link a very concrete agenda. “It is a place where dialogue is possible,” says Stuart Veech, “across generations, across discipline.”
With their modern monument, the architects offer the art of Mascha Veech’s parents an appropriate showroom. The sculptor Vadim Kosatschof, born in 1938, and the painter and textile artist Elena Koneff, born in 1939, both native Moscow, married for more than 60 years, suffered from political repression and artistic tightness in the Soviet Union. Despite great bureaucratic difficulties, they succeeded in leaving in 1979. From then on they migrated through German -speaking countries, operated a studio and realized large -scale projects between abstract sculpture and architecture. In 2011 they moved from Wiesbaden to the Lower Austrian court, in a house that was designed by the daughter and son -in -law and hidden in the forest above the town – anthracite -colored house, which is reminiscent of a transverse box. It is equally retreats such as creative cells, in which the two artists saw new works, milling, pouring, weaving and making. This also testifies to a sculpture garden with kinetic works by Kosatschof, which claims formal abstract sovereignty and still fit organically into nature and react with flutter movements and sounds to wind and weather.
In Studio X2732 you can currently see a fascinating show by the Kosatschof and Koneff, which was curated by the Albertina Modern Director Angela Stief and runs until the end of November. The exhibition Borderline Especially shows works from the Soviet phase of the artist couple from the 1970s. Vadim’s aquatic machines are fascinating, fragile structures from industrial porcelain, reinforced by golden shimmering, pointed metal struts that are not hidden inside, but, like an outer skeleton, on the outside. A playful memento to the industrial age, which transforms the functionality of the apparatus world into a functionality.
Those attached to the wall Black Reliefs Elena mark a strong contrast: the link work from the tradition of the tapisserie goes far beyond their aesthetic boundaries. Threads made of sisal and other yarns are woven, knotted and braided in such a way that patterns and boosts are created that give classic high -fabric technology more depth, body and plasticity. In this way, patterns and line systems are created that let the merciless cartographs think of or mutations with “writing errors” in the blueprint.
The two strong and gruesome, beautiful positions are complemented and contrasted by work of the son-in-law Stuart Veech, Opake Objects in the traditional line of US minimalism: black synthetic membranes, which are pulled up to the zip line over arches made of metal.
The history of the family clan, which links the urban to the rural and puts the organic-biological with the technical-industrialist in an aesthetic tension, harbors the history of political upheavals and artistic revolutions of the 20th and 21st centuries as in a nutshell. Especially when the two ancestors tell, it quickly becomes clear what long artistic journey was undertaken here.
Already in the first training period at the art high school in Moscow, when the doctrine of the socialist realism was a guideline, the young artists were able to snack on the forbidden fruits of the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s. Because in cellar deposits of the nearby tretjakow gallery, the works of those universal artists of Russian constructivism, which were increasingly outlawed in the Stalin dictatorship: Wladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodtschenko, El Lissitzky and Kasimir Malewitsch, were form-destroyed and artistic reinforced. Holdless elegance between painting, plastic, architecture, furniture design, stage design and poster design moved.
This undogmatic world suitability also shaped the art of art of the Kosatschof and Koneff and is still her driving force: In combination with her daughter Mascha and the son-in-law Stuart Veech, room concepts and tension-charged object assemblies are created that take up the Russian heritage and translate into the lingua Franca of a mentally liberated global art. Embedded in the here and now and yet equipped with a slightly accent -colored artistic tongue, which conjures up a heroic avant -garde from the past as future -oriented phantasmagory.
And so the little court on the high wall with the Studio X2732 houses a project of artistic self -empowerment and a stylistic unleashing in Austria: “It is about the willingness to make radical decisions, uncompromising and beyond conventions,” says Vadim Kosatschof, the great communicator of the family. He points to the sculpture Unfolding Square, One of the eye -catchers of the exhibition. The three -meter -high object made of shimmering aluminum folds apart with its asymmetrically shaken triangular shape like a giant blossom and reflects the surrounding event.
He always strived that the sculpture was not a closed object, says Kosatschof. Rather, it should come into a dialogue with the environment. “Light makes this possible: it transforms the shape into an event.”
