Richard Hoeck

The starting point for Richard Hoeck's installation is a real and yet, in its final form, fictive, architectural project: The Additional Bedroom. A separate small building was erected at a conspicuous location in the park of a seventeenth-century estate in southern Vienna. Hoeck, in quoting the classic building codes specified for a pavilion, contrasts the historically determined purpose of such a "pleasure house" with the prissy directness of a bedroom. The artist thus turns into a contractor who interferes with the directions and desires of his clients' lives via structural issues identified with the building. The model-based visualisation of the project reveals massive differences between Hoeck's artistic approach and traditional ways of architectural planning. It is not the technical presentation of the various constructions, but the references in terms of content and atmosphere that convey a compressed impression of the structure of the artist's ideas.

In The Additional Bedroom Richard Hoeck brings together, in a fascinating way, a number of leitmotifs that can be found elsewhere in his work - obsessive behaviourand clichéd representation are combined with ideas and forms of the 1970s, with "red-light district" fantasies, with the American Way of Life and the Western Tradition.