Hans Schabus, Verlangen und Begehren, installation view, Engholm Engelhorn Gallery, Vienna, 2008

‘For me sculpture is the organisation of material within space’, Hans Schabus once said. And it’s not surprising that the artist’s new works at Kerstin Engholm in Vienna represent five variations on the artist’s concept of space, through mapping ground that he has already tested. Through a conceptual language, which is typical of the artist’s register, works on show operate in a more abstract dimension with some biting inflections.

The exhibition, Demanding and Desire, divides into two separates parts, where limited and unlimited space meet, oppose and overlap. Entering the gallery’s space, the installation Up Side Down-On Knees and Nose — as prompted by its title — takes its ‘physical’ role in the supine bowing-down towards a mutational state of its form. The door lying on the floor is actually specific to prefabricated buildings, the so-called moveable houses. Bent in three parts and opened as a squeeze box, plays a game with its function and its role within the space, shifting from operating as a threshold object to a sculpture.

Tomorrow will be like Today follows the same process of understanding and opens up to the more conceptual works on show. 572 KG OF AIR looks back to 17th-century scientific discoveries by Otto von Guericke, who was the first to study air and empty space properties, and calculates exactly the KG of the air that fills the gallery. The same volume of air comes in and out from the broken glasses of Against The Wall, which is itself an oxymoron that fits well with Übrig geblieben (Welt) (Leftovers [World]), due to their stylistic affinities.

If it is possible to reconcile the element of air with a unit of measurement, to calculate its weight and volume, the writing of Echo on the wall recalls the limitation of the space, given the nature of the phenomenon that makes the echo occur: the collision of a sound wave against another element; where limited and unlimited finally meet.