1967 born in Graz, Austria

1982 move to California

1985-1989 studies in History and Art at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, ME and at MIT's Medial Lab

lives and works in New York

Johannes Girardoni is an Austrian-born, American-based sculptor and installation artist. Girardoni’s works are reductive investigations at the intersection of sculpture and painting, through which he explores the continuously shifting relationship between reality and image. His material vocabulary – found wood, plywood, wax, pigment, light, enamel and plexiglass - and its physical constellation, become both the carrier of an explicitly painterly event, while also being the foundation of an immaterial phenomenon. The works are often examinations of phenomenological processes, where a hollow or empty space – a tangible emptiness --– turns out to be the actual center of the work. Opposites and contradictions, as well as the complex dialectic between them, are Girardoni’s fundamental themes. His orchestration of material and light, presence and absence, things found and things formed, all resist clear fixation, thereby maintaining and creating works with their own non-derivable reality.

Girardoni’s works have been exhibited and acquired by numerous public and private collections, including the Fogg Art Museum, the Ludwig Museum, Germany, and the Progressive Art Collection. His first exhibition in New York was in 1991 at the Stephen Haller Gallery, after his work came to the attention of curator/author Prof. Friedhelm Mennekes, director of Kunst-Station St. Peter in Cologne, Germany. Since then, his works have been increasingly widely shown in both group and solo-exhibitions in gallery and museum venues. Girardoni has exhibited at The Center for Maine Contemporary Art, The Fairfield University Museum, The Bucknell University Museum, and the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art Peekskill Project, New York. In 2009, his work will be included in the exhibition Creative Migration at the Austrian Cultural Forum, New York, as well as in Three Decades of Contemporary Art at the California Center for the Arts.

Girardoni’s work has received critical acclaim in Sculpture Magazine, the New York Times, ArtNews, Arts Magazine, and NY ARTS amongst others. Girardoni was included in Personal Structures (Cornerhouse), a book about 16 international artists which is published in German, English and Dutch editions. A 116 page monograph was published by Feichtner Editions (ISBN 3-9502072-1-X) on the occasion of his most recent solo exhibitions in Austria and New York.

Girardoni grew up in Vienna, and outside a small rural village on the Hungarian border in Austria. In 1982 he emigrated and moved to California. Girardoni went on to study History and Art at Bowdoin College, ME, earning a B.A. in both in 1989. During this time, he also accepted an invitation to be a guest artist at M.I.T.’s Media Lab. The artist lives and works in New York.