Modern Art - Austria / II. Republic of Austria 2014 - 62 Euro Cent

The design instruments of the important avant-garde artist Peter Weibel include texts, sculptures, videos, performances, installations, music and computer technology. His art and the analytical-critical attitude that he closely associates with it always give him courage - Peter Weibel also does not keep his position as curator, media theorist and publicist. In 2014, he received the Oskar Kokoschka Prize for his artistic oeuvre, and Austrian Post honors him with this special stamp from the series "Contemporary Art". Peter Weibel was born on 5 March 1944 in Odessa, Ukraine, and grew up in Upper Austria. In Paris, he began studying literature, in 1964 he moved to Vienna, where he enrolled in medicine, but finally switched to mathematics. At that time he moved from experimental literature to action art. He soon collaborated with Viennese actionists such as Otto Muehl, Günter Brus or Hermann Nitsch and became known for his critical examination of the media and their contribution to the construction of reality. In particular, the inflammatory speech directed at or against the government, which he held with burning gloves at the University of Vienna, made him an important representative of the Austrian '68 movement. With his then partner Valie Export he worked on an "extended cinema", which deconstructed the conventional cinematic norms and rules, his "teleaktionen" were broadcast in 1972 on the ORF within the program "Impulse". In the 1980s, Weibel began to deal with the digital editing of videos, the 1990s enabled him first interactive computer installations. Peter Weibel has been teaching at various universities since 1976, including the Vienna University of Applied Arts, the Canadian College of Art and Design, Halifax, and the State University of New York. Until 1994 he headed the "Institute for New Media" in the Frankfurt Städelschule, from 1992 to 1995 he was also artistic director of the Linz Ars Electronica, to which he still stands today as an artistic consultant. He has also curated several times the Austrian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale (1993 to 1999), the Neue Galerie at Grazer Joanneum (1992 to 2011), the Seville Biennial (2008) and the Moscow Biennial (2011). Since 1999 he has been the director of the Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe (ZKM). Weibel has published numerous articles on contemporary art, media theory, film or philosophy and is an important representative and creator of media art in Europe. The special stamp shows the subject of the video "Peter Weibel Media Poet", which presents the versatile work of the media artist with selected video recordings from 1967 to 2009. In addition to performances and installations, his musical project "Hotel Morphila Orchester" will also be shown.