OUBEY@Global Peter Drucker Forum in Vienna

“What we need today are not tunnel vision thinkers but inquiring free-ranging minds because such minds are best fitted to cope with complexity”.

This was one of the key points made by Prof. Peter Kruse in his address at the opening of the Berlin exhibition of the OUBEY Global Encounter Tour in March 2013.

Peter Kruse is well known in Germany for his research into how self-organizing systems and intelligent networks perform and function, and for his perceptive cultural analysis – as well as for his at times provoking and highly controversial ideas. From his own fresh and unfamiliar vantage point, he cast new light on OUBEY and the idiosyncratic maturation process that gave birth to his art, a process, as he underlined, that was shaped and molded by the instincts and capabilities of an inquiring free-ranging mind.

OUBEYs art is now presented at this year’s Drucker Forum in an exceptional setting that at the same time offers a special kind of resonance space. People from all over the world concerned with the problems of complexity management are gathering in Vienna for two days of sophisticated debate and exchange on the level of written and spoken communication. They will be discussing new approaches, models and concepts in an effort to identify what can be done to enable managers to deal more successfully and more efficiently with the challenges of increasing complexity and dynamics. In the midst of these encounters and exchanges a number of OUBEYs paintings will make their own silent contribution, in a universal language that has no need of words, to an understanding of what complexity is and how it affects us. Inviting us all to free-ranging inquiry across set frontiers and boundaries.

At first sight it might seem that there is no obvious connection neither between art and management in general nor between management and OUBEYs art in particular. In this context the decisive link is furnished by the theme of complexity which was of passionate interest to OUBEY and a theme which he explored throughout his lifetime, and certainly not in his art alone, ever since he first laid hands on Ilya Prigogine’s Order out of Chaos: Man’s new dialogue with nature in 1981. An intellectual inquiry into complexity, holistic systems and networking that opened up entirely new perspectives in its time.

It might seem obvious to say that it’s much easier for an artist to find solutions for dealing with complexity and much more difficult for a manager to do the same. Yet, artists embark on the free creative process in the sense of an inquiring exploration across the boundaries of different worlds just as any other person would begin it – by the power of their own decision, consequently and continuously strengthening their personal autonomy and their ability to expand their scope.