What does a car sound like when it moves horizontally? And what about an elevator when it moves vertically? The State Gallery of Lower Austria inspires visitors with artistic interventions.

People crowded together in the elevator. An awkward silence. All eyes glued to the floor. Every second of the ride is just too long. Who hasn’t been in this situation? The State Gallery of Lower Austria guarantees you’ll have a completely different experience this time. Here, the nearly thirty-second ride to the third floor in the roomy elevator brings a smile to passengers' faces. Hilarity ensues. Enthusiasts ride up and down several times.

What is this all about? The elevator catches passengers off guard with a sound installation by Werner Reiterer. For his art, the artist likes to work with unusual spaces. He disrupts perspectives by playfully challenging expectations. Die Eroberung der Vertikale (The conquest of the vertical), his sound installation inside the elevator of the State Gallery, explores how people move through space. For thousands of years, movement was horizontal. Only in relatively recent history has it been possible to move in a vertical direction. Reiterer’s ironic take on this state of affairs offers passengers an element of surprise. 

The unique architecture of the State Gallery of Lower Austria is not the museum’s only significant feature. There is also the inscription by artist Leo Zogmayer: wenn ich kunst sage meine ich das ganze (When I say art I mean everything) appearing in gray letters on an exterior concrete wall. The phrase can be seen on the ground floor through the museum’s large arched windows. Simple in design, Zogmayer’s inscription opens up an interesting space for reflecting on the building’s conceptual underpinnings and architecture. Both the structure and the sentence make use of “twisting” to defamiliarize perceptions. For Zogmayer, art begins where our linguistic capacities end. His philosophical musings on the role of art also question what meaning art can have for each viewer personally, for a museum, or for society.

Judith Fegerl’s permanent artistic intervention also references the museum’s architecture. It seeks to make the structure’s ostensible kinetic energy visible. For her work anchors, located on the ground floor of the State Gallery, Fegerl specified three “anchor points” from where the imaginary forces of the building’s architectural rotation emanate. At these points, she inserted geometric concrete recesses fashioned out of positive and negative forms, creating an unexpected and unusual architectural element.

Fegerl and Zogmayer’s works were developed during the construction phase of the museum as part of FUNDAMENTAL, a project realized by the State Gallery of Lower Austria based on a concept by Rainer Prohaska.

The temporary installation by Frenzi Rigling in the stairwell of the State Gallery is delicate and unassuming, yet all the more appealing as a result. A 24.38-meter-long fabric ribbon leads up toward the exhibitions on the third floor. The ribbon is made up of numerous strips of different fabric, each of which are one meter long and three centimeters wide. Rigling created the ribbon out of fabric scraps from dresses her mother sewed for her in the 1970s and 1980s. The artist elicits a very distinctive form of poetry from the everyday. With the installation 24.38 (Zeitstück) (24.38 (Timepiece)), Rigling has created a memento that preserves personal and familiar elements. The reduced and precisely placed intervention not only spans the central vertical axis of the museum’s stairwell, but also metaphorically represents the connection between above and below, past and present.