Bernhard Leitner

Already at the end of the 1960s, Austrian architect and artist Bernhard Leitner designed the first sound-space sculpture, or architecture – a sound architecture fed by various audio channels –, in New York, back then, however, without the technical possibilities to actually put them into practice. Leitner’s interest in space and architecture, in classical and modern music, in modern dance and the technical instruments of 20th Century art provided the matrix for the development of the concept.
The exhibition designed for the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart will exclusively focus on sketches, notes, models and photographs related to his early and merely theoretical experimentations. First sound-space explorations from 1971 to 1973, now actually realised with the aid of a relay circuit operated with a crank handle and a punch-tape programming device, will be at the heart of the White Cube exhibition - not a historical reconstruction but the first sound-space sculpture realised with the aid of modern control devices in the history of visual art.