Peter Pakesch
Peter Pakesch, Vienna, 6 October 2022
“It was long the case that the East was nowhere near present enough for us.”
Gallerist, curator, museum director: from running Vienna’s now-legendary “Gallerie…” to serving as founding director of Kunsthaus Graz, Peter Pakesch’s championing of contemporary art made him a figure whose impact has indeed been felt well beyond Austria’s borders. From his present-day vantage point in the offices of the Maria Lassnig Foundation as its general manager, Pakesch tells of the “curiosity” that led—not least—to his enthusiastic excursions through Eastern Europe, which were anything but common practice in Austria’s stuffy atmosphere prior to the mid-1980s. He recalls encounters with the Hungarian curator Lorant Hegyi, the Soviet conceptualist Ilya Kabakov, and other avant-garde discoveries who existed in the slipstream of that period’s state-sanctioned art in the Eastern Bloc. In this, the story told by Pakesch effects a variation on the question as to how our own orientation, shaped as it is by Western desires and fashions, prefigures our gaze upon the East.
“It was long the case that the East was nowhere near present enough for us.”
Gallerist, curator, museum director: from running Vienna’s now-legendary “Gallerie…” to serving as founding director of Kunsthaus Graz, Peter Pakesch’s championing of contemporary art made him a figure whose impact has indeed been felt well beyond Austria’s borders. From his present-day vantage point in the offices of the Maria Lassnig Foundation as its general manager, Pakesch tells of the “curiosity” that led—not least—to his enthusiastic excursions through Eastern Europe, which were anything but common practice in Austria’s stuffy atmosphere prior to the mid-1980s. He recalls encounters with the Hungarian curator Lorant Hegyi, the Soviet conceptualist Ilya Kabakov, and other avant-garde discoveries who existed in the slipstream of that period’s state-sanctioned art in the Eastern Bloc. In this, the story told by Pakesch effects a variation on the question as to how our own orientation, shaped as it is by Western desires and fashions, prefigures our gaze upon the East.