VISITING HOURS
Fridays and Saturdays
11:00AM– 5:00PM
The MAK Center for Art and Architecture is pleased to announce the 26th iteration of Garage Exchange Vienna—Los Angeles, featuring Vienna-based artist Christoph Meier and Los Angeles-based artist Chadwick Rantanen at the Mackey Apartments Garage Top.
There is no sound without space. In this exhibition, Christoph Meier and Chadwick Rantanen instrumentalize the exhibition site for its material resonance. The works frame and mirror the gallery, walking its perimeter and reflecting its activities. Here the Garage Top Gallery can be better viewed as a resonant chamber reverberating around the inconspicuous works concealed inside it.
Christoph Meier and Chadwick Rantanen both produce work using the gallery and exhibition as a site for intervention and negotiation. They incorporate the language of institutional critique while drawing in other subjects, like healthcare, hospitality, and commercial manufacturing. Independently, each has turned to sound in their practices as both subject and medium.
For this exhibition Meier produced untitled (Hollywood) (2025), a rectangular polished steel plate, playable by the viewer. Continuing his work with Grassmayr Bell Foundry, a 400 year old foundry in Innsbruck, Austria, untitled (Hollywood) acts as both a mirror and a portal in the exhibition space, with its delicate polished surface interrupted only by triangular cuts in the plate producing specific notes when sounded. The piece negotiates the visible and invisible, moving from a silent mirror blending into its surroundings to a sonorous vibrating mirage.
In Changers (2025), Rantanen continues his use of straightened coat hangers, brackets, and connectors, suffusing the space with seemingly improvised wire modules running along and punctuating the walls. The wire junctions both adhere to and corrupt the orderliness of the space. The skeletal web-like forms function as an infrastructure for moving energy but are left inoperable. A collection of loose ends, abrupt and unfulfilled.
Garage Exchange: Christoph Meier and Chadwick Rantanen oscillates between explosion and calm, passing material qualities back and forth. A polished plate crashes and the guttural jangling of wires soon falls silent. Energy is captured in tension, channeling the machines toward unknown directions.
Artists
CHRISTOPH MEIER
Christoph Meier (b. 1980, Vienna) studied architecture at the Vienna University of Technology and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Glasgow School of Art. His internationally exhibited, installation-based work often engages with architectural and social spaces. Meier has participated in numerous exhibitions, including at the Museum of Applied Arts Vienna, Wiener Festwochen, Portland Institute of Art, Etablissement d’en face Brussels, and the Nam June Paik Art Center Seoul. He has presented solo exhibitions at venues such as Casino Luxembourg, Kiosk Gent, Kunstverein Hamburg, Kunsthaus Graz, and the Vienna Secession. Since 2009, Meier has co-published the artist fanzine BLACK PAGES with Ute Müller and Nick Oberthaler and, in 2016, co-founded the independent exhibition space Guimarães in Vienna. From 2019 to 2020, he was professor at the Institute of Art and Design at the Vienna University of Technology, where he now works as a senior artist at the Research Unit for Three-Dimensional Design and Model Making. Recently Meier has realized Gills Bells, a large-scale carillon as a public artwork in Gilsdorf, Luxembourg.
CHADWICK RANTANEN
Chadwick Rantanen (b. 1981, Wausau, WI) appropriates the forms of familiar consumer goods and modifies and re-contextualizes them into sculptural tools. Adapting and conforming to architecture and infrastructure, Rantanen’s sculptures mimic installations or site-specific works, often taking the form of an adaptor, wedging between objects and their sources of power, articulating a web of accommodation, compromise, maintenance and parasitism by slightly detouring energy, but never causing harm. His solo exhibitions include Secession, Vienna, Austria; Museo Pietro Canonica, Rome, Italy; Standard (Oslo), Oslo, Norway; Essex Street, New York, New York; Overduin and Co., Los Angeles, California; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, Bel Ami, Los Angeles, California; CAPITAL, San Francisco, California.
ABOUT GARAGE EXCHANGE
Garage Exchange Vienna—Los Angeles seeks to foster relationships, conversations and collaborations in the arts between Los Angeles and Austria. In order to expand the cultural exchange at the core of the Artists and Architects-in-Residence program, the Austrian Federal Chancellery and the MAK Center invite Austrian and Vienna-based alumni residents to collaborate with L.A. artists and architects of their choosing at the Garage Top at the Mackey Apartments for the Garage Exchange Vienna-Los Angeles exhibition series.
Garage Exchange: Christoph Meier and Chadwick Rantanen is curated by Seymour Polatin, Exhibitions and Programs Manager. This exhibition is made possible with support from the Federal Ministry European and International Affairs Republic of Austria, the Austrian Consulate General in Los Angeles, and Bildrecht.
Above Image: Chadwick Rantanen, Melisma, Detail view, Can, Vienna, April 8 - May 4, 2025. Image Courtesy of the Artist.