Bruce Conner demonstrated a new path to making films that revealed a large number of exegeses and possible variations. Born in 1933, he was a member of the first generation of American independent filmmakers in the circle of Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith, and Jonas Mekas. The artist died in San Francisco in 2008, having spent much of his life there. He was close to the Beat Generation and its free-spirited redefinition of the American way of life, and during the 1950s he made sculptures from nylon stockings, pieces of furniture, broken dolls, and other refuse from an affluent society—long before the trash aesthetic became a form of artistic expression.

The exhibition will include a selection of his most important films of the past fifty years as well as drawings that reveal a very different facet of his creativity: grid structures of small, Rorschach-test-like forms produced by inkblots on corrugated, concertina-like paper. The exhibition presents an artist who, despite pioneering achievements in numerous areas, has remained an insider’s tip in comparison to the stars of Pop Art and the legendary poets of the Beat movement. The exhibition will after then take place from October 8, 2010, to January 30, 2011, at the Kunsthalle Wien.