Heimo Zobernig's work exemplifies the potential and complexity of artistic practices that occupied a large part of the 1980s in Western Europe, a moment when artists began to take art history back on board. Growing up after the demise of Conceptual art, the Austrian artist is part of a generation for whom it was natural to reconnect with tradition, and in the mid-1980s Zobernig began an 'open artwork' in which various historical propositions of abstract art were at play (Constructivism, De Stijl, Konkrete Kunst, Minimal art). This led to a larger and lucid body of work that today covers an extensive array of experimental investigations in various media and exhibition making.

The return to tradition in the 1980s was fiercely attacked by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, who accused artists of regressive attempts to restore the visual order to one that preceded Conceptual art.¹ To Buchloh, the embrace of figurative painting signalled the art world's amnesia, and was a negative move rejecting the critical implications of Conceptualism's attempt to eradicate the visual from art practice - an act of artistic purification. But this is not the case with Zobernig, whose return to art history was done from a perspective sharpened by the Conceptual project. Zobernig's work embodies the ambivalence and hesitation with which certain artists of his generation used and processed arthistorical sources. Conceptual art had confronted the naïve belief in the power and expressive potential of images, and this 'negative conviction' was carried on in the progressive propositions of the 1980s. In the same manner Zobernig's work possesses an undertone of scepticism about form as carrier of meaning tout court - something always seems to get