2012, martin schnur

It may be surprising because of the quality and perfection of the artwork, but Martin Schnur did not study painting. His education was in the art of sculpting, painting he taught himself. A memorable experience for him was the encounter with Sol LeWitt, the American master of concept art. Different levels of reality, artfully put together to a whole, are a characteristic feature of many paintings of the Austrian artist Martin Schnur. the finesse, how Schnur manages to put together different motives to a whole painting, but still leaves them seemingly autonomously, is a great part of the excitement and allurement of his compositions.

2011, Markus Wilfling

With his art Wilfling aims at visually and virtually penetrating spaces, surfaces and planes and at reducing laws of statics to absurdity. His work is about the irritation of conditioned imaginings and definitions of perception. Reality becomes unpredictable and uncontrollable, seeming and being, virtuality and reality as well as the imaginary and the concrete-objective merge. The boundaries between interior and exterior, top and bottom, closeness and distance, from which he generates unexpected spatial dynamic movements, seem to disappear. (Hartwig Knack, Raum, Wahrnehmung, Bewegung In: Markus Wilfling, zwischen dem Raum 2009, publ.: Bibliothek der Provinz)

2010, Josef Wurm

Josef Wurm in conversation is always ready to break out of the conventions that say things have to be made determinate, pin-downable – conventions of a world that is more and more a fluid succession of beginnings and ends of micro and macrocosmoses, anyway, making up stuff about Rimbaud, Vermeer, Klaus Kinski, Mötörhead, or again about Hunter S. Thompson, film, Quentin Tarantino, then greeting a philosopher or two in this kaleidoscopic party, spinning threads of synaethesia, cheerfully searching – and then he hops around on all these above the snoozing, yawning gaps between the styles, materials, techniques in a way that couldn´t be more refreshing for me. Whether it´s complete house fronts worked over with the spray can, comic strips, snappy logos for rock bands or big acrylic paintings where maybe Franz Kafka meets Salvador Dali, or another time a figure, turned away from the observer, his few possessions tied to him and evidently a burden, at the end of a world already falling away beneath his feet, but stabbing his bayonet into the opening void before him, carrying his cross like a late-capitalist Christ on the via doloraosa of a new finiteness. Reports pulled out into the light from the cracks and fissures of a world, bursting with vitality, oscillate with gusto between iconographic irony and sorties out into a certainty that rushes ahead of itself and when we get it into view, makes us wonder at the solemn poetry. (Joachim J. Vötter)

2011, Manfred Erjautz

Familiar things are called into question and referred to different emotional levels in a sociological “experiment of crisis”. The dominant emotional area which is being touched on is melancholy. Melancholy surfaces in Manfred Erjautz’ art both as a reminiscence to another – probably better – time as well as a longing for happiness and ‘renormalisation’ of conditions. (Falter 2006)

2010, Gabriele Sturm

Gabriele Sturm explores intercultural relations and examines them critically. Part of her work has to do with transfers between cultures, times and places, that belong to our contemporary experience of globalization and arise out of the economic interconnections it brings. Her observations of seemingly mundane and obvious actions, situations and things around her are the raw material she uses to analyze social and cultural contexts and to form precise impressions of their historical genesis across wide spans of time and space. (Rainer Fuchs)