Rudolf Polanszky, who has been working since the 1980s, is a Viennese artist. His early work, influenced perhaps by Viennese Actionism, was concerned with the body and subjecting it to various unpleasant activities often invoking the unconscious or rather the non conscious. He made paintings, for example in a state between sleep and an awakened state and compared them to those he made when fully awake. He made films of himself drinking and, as a result of drunkenness, vomiting, trying to access reflexive, non cognitive actions. Rudolf Polanszky emerges from a generation of post 1960s artists that includes Dieter Roth, Valie Export and Franz West. In more recent years he has made sculpture. His sculptures contain the raw scraps of industrial materiality – iron, wood, plastic – bound in visually delicate but robustly balanced ‘plinths’, which carry aloft Plexiglas sections in part describing a circle, or horizontal sections the length of a rectangle and reminiscent of strata below the surface of the earth. The sculptures, like vessels, are sometimes filled with smaller versions of themselves, or else more fluid and visceral substances such as feathers, pigment, foam and fiberglass, ranging in form from the model to the monumental. Polanszky is little known outside Vienna although he has shown at Ancient and Modern in London and Frith Street Gallery, London. He was included in Franz West’s much praised Hamsterwheel exhibition shown at the Venice Biennale 2007 and Malmö Konsthall, Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse and Macba, Barcelona.