Under the title NEW YEAR, NEW ME, gallery twenty-six’s 2025 exhibition program will kick off on Friday, January 10th with a powerful mix of the completely new and the already somewhat familiar. On the ground floor, we will introduce you to three artist personalities, who are making their debut at gallery twenty-six in NEW YEAR, NEW ME: Ines Riess, Azucena Perez Merkel and Rasool Hosseini.
Being able to look back on an successful career in the private sector, Ines Riess is now living her passion and is currently working on her thesis while completing a program at the Vienna Art School.
In her art (paintings and sculptures in mixed media), Riess often merges the rational with the intuitive, the disciplined with the chaotic, and the technical with the imaginary, exploring the polarities of her own experiences, reflecting on people who subtly influence her and on experiences that leave a mark, referring to her art as her her „visual diary“.
Riess often magnifies details until they become abstract, unveiling intricate structures beneath—interpreted through the artist‘s personal lens.
Having spent 25 years in business internationally and with a background partly in technical science, according to Riess, who has experienced different cultures, countries, homes, professional and private roles, these experiences have profoundly refined the way she engages with, relates to and feels about art. As the selected paintings span a significant period and are drawn from various series, they do not follow an explicit unifying theme. Guided by a playful attitude and an exploratory spirit, the artist embraces new techniques and motifs, treating her work as “a visual diary, that thoughtfully reflects my learnings and journeys with gratitude and an open mind and heart.“
The sculptures‘ underlying material is clay, which has been altered into ceramic elements that either support, hold, or enhance the other materials used. Solely ceramic objects are intricately connected to the purity of the material from which they are crafted. They exhibit simplicity, natural texture, and a plain form.
Born in 1996 in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, Azucena Perez Merkel grew up in an artistic environment, with her Austrian mother being a psychologist and writer , and her Mexican father, an encaustic painter at Bellas Artes (San Miguel’s renowned Academy of Art). In 2020, a life-altering car accident became a pivotal moment: “If not death, then painting.” It was a call to recommit fully to her craft. Her pursuit of classical mastery led her to Florence’s Angel Academy, though her true breakthrough came when she studied under Adam Miller for three transformative years.
Azucena’s work, which has already been shown in Mexico the US, Austria and Italy, is driven by an exploration of the human drama, emotional chaos, and the contradictions of the human experience. She finds beauty in disorder and strives to capture the complexity of life through the technical excellence of Renaissance and Baroque traditions. Her goal remains ambitious yet clear: to honor the legacy of the great masters by creating work of enduring quality and profound impact. Azucena’s journey reflects resilience, passion, and an unwavering commitment to her art, bridging the past and present through her dedication to classical painting.
Rasool Hosseini, who studied painting and printmaking at Vienna Art School, has established a clear technical modus operandi for himself in order to realize his artistic vision in the best possible way: he creates his works of art which are objects rather than paintings by cutting patterns or lines into boards or sheets of chipboard (technically akin to traditional woodblock printmaking), then spraying paint onto the structure and sometimes additionally applying print colour onto the wooden object via a paint roller.
“I try to create vivid images, everything that is created is real.
We are in a situation where the facts have no strange occasion, they are all in an aura of ambiguity. And my attempt is to present only a true and accurate picture of these denied or ignored facts. The most important elements in my work are shadow and light. With the help of these two, I try to portray darkness and light (non-peace, peace) together. Perhaps, a moment of hesitation in this sense brings us closer to our inner self in the minimal result and makes a step towards peace.”
Downstairs, you will find an exciting New Year’s firework- like display of highlights from the works of nine artists who have been associated with our gallery for quite some time now: Alice Ella, Lavinia Lanner, Franziska Schemel, Christian Bazant-Hegemark, Jaroslav Valečka, Robert W. Sackl-Kahr Sagostin, Wolfgang Uranitsch, Martin Rak and Jan Urant.
Alice Ella‘s latest works of art captivate due to and excel through their motivic immediacy, with a considerable amount of their appeal lying in their typical aesthetics, the Alice-Ella-signature style: vigorous coloring, rich in contrast, highly stylized silhouettes, effusive postures, iconic attributes, the memorable stylistic idiom somewhere between art deco, pop art and instagram-aesthetics, the recurring two central motifs hat and mouth; By dint of their interplay and synergy the depicted faces are turned into ciphers – enigmatic, utterly complex, highly charged symbols.
Playing with attributions and supposed trompe l’oeil effects, Lavinia Lanner subtly and extremely effectively demonstrates to the viewer how much we are all prisoners of our perceptual apparatus on the one hand and prisoners of language (in the Wittgensteinian sense) on the other. How to name something? How to categorize something? How to perceive it at all?
With pinpoint accuracy Christian Bazant-Hegemark works in an utterly fascinating manner between the analogous and the digital, touching on two major taboo subjects: error and trauma. What does exactly happen while it happens? What happens afterwards? What happens after the aftermath? How do you really deal constructively with distortion and failure? In this exhibition parts of his “Glitch“-series will be displayed.
In her pictorial objects, Franziska Schemel deals with living in urban space. She describes the paths within our everyday environment and extends them, adding a possible perspective via a photo, into the seemingly infinite without being aimless. The movements of everyday life are recognizable and perceptible in her works, the inner and outer areas, the daily comings and goings, are given a clear definition. Corridors, entrances and exits, underpasses, stairs, subway stations – the spatial-architectural embodiment of transition – remain almost entirely beneath the surface of the urban threshold of perception and only reveal their spectacular nature upon closer inspection: The function of these architectural elements with their specific aesthetics is clear and yet these spaces – animated in this way – are always in a certain sense merely architectural catalysts: zero and pivot of transition in one: “a space that you enter in order to leave it again”.
The artist assembles her own small-format photographs into her large-format panels (which means by far more than the painterly taking-up, the motivic or image compositional continuation of the photographic work beyond its edges), often depicting people at the intersection. The human figure – passers-by (never staged, always real) – people, each in their own world – is essential to the image as it “shows the way“, according to the artist, Thus a window opens through which Schemel draws the viewers‘ attention to the imaginary-illusionary within the real, reveals the artificiality of urban living environments, with all their sociological and psychological implications.
Born in 1984 in Prague, where he has lived all his life, photographer Martin Rak got his first camera from his grandfather at the age of six and has been interested in photography ever since. Rak himself considers 2009, when he bought his first digital SLR camera to be the starting point of his artistic work, which has already earned him numerous awards (including the Czech Republic Natuional Award at the 2016 Sony World Photography Awards, the 3rd place at the 2014 International Photo Awards IPA as well as the 1st prize and other awards in various categoriesat the 2014 Prix de la Photographie Paris Px3).
Robert W. Sackl-Kahr Sagostin is probably one of the most colorful personalities representing contemporary avant-garde in Central Europe.
Born in Graz in 1960, the artist, who used to live in Marrakech for six years, and now prefers a life of commuting between Vienna, Trieste and southwestern France, has been creating an oeuvre that encompasses almost all fields of the visual arts: photography, graphics, illustration, painting, industrial design, sculpture and stage design, in it‘s depth and variety creating an entire personal universe of art, a fact that has already been taken into account by numerous awards committees. In 2020 the artist received a Golden Lion [Venice].
The term “metal spray art“ has been coined by the artist Wolfgang Uranitsch himself, describing his art. The actual stylistic kinship of Uranitsch‘s unique way of combining screen printing and traditional painting – utilising acrylic spray varnish – on iron to the graffiti genre of stencils is just as remarkable as the fact that Jean Baudrillard refers to urban space not only as „polygon of signs, media and codes“, but also – specifically – as (“semiurgy“and/or) “metallurgy“, which extends the conceptual connections and determines the semantic context of the artist‘s decision in favour of (the from an art-historical point of view rather infrequently found) iron as the image carrier far beyond any kind of mere fascination with aesthetic subtleties. Capitalizing on the physical characteristics of metal, as has been the case for decades already, leveraging both the entire bandwidth of corrosion and light reflections is key to his spray art. Uranitsch generates his broad spectrum of pictorial motifs from the ubiquitous flood of images that we are constantly exposed to. Time and time again it is the work of Andy Warhol that inspires him, stimulating an utterly intense kind of artistic dialogue in the creative field of tension between paying tribute to and working through the pop art idol‘s legacy on a symbolic level, thereby following a well established tradition within appropriation art.
Reality gets abstracted by Jan Urant as he blends stories and memories, that accumulate around him through himself, friends and acquaintances, powerfully utilizing the sense of color and space, putting special emphasis on the “field“ quality, therefore working in oil on canvas, adding dry pigment, sometimes using iridescent pigments (as they are shining when looked at from different angles, and even fluorescent, which is why they are sometimes applied as layers).
The striking image compositions have a certain sense of reduction to them, as far as the number of pictorial elements and the illusion of space are concerned, which is why one might find that Urant‘s paintings breathe the spirit of the Nabis in some kind of way.
Creating his works through a long process of painting, washing off, scraping off and applying dry pigments, Urant‘s dreamy pictorial images with multiple layers of colors and narratives, depict a complex inner world, somewhere beyond the restricions of time, space and memory, the viewers find themselves magically enticed by and downright drawn into, following the pigments, retracing their dissolving and sedimenting on the border of materiality, reflecting the transience of individual human existence. Far beyond the directness and the intensity of the first encounter between the viewers and the works of art, a game of co-creation unfolds in the process of looking. In the viewer’s presence the paintings come to life, a new entity emerges, during an intimate dialogue between picture and viewer, whichis essential to the artist: “It‘s about the ability to see something as a whole, but also to see something anew, each time people look at it.“
Stylistically, as well as in form and content, there are certain essential elements within Jaroslav Valečka‘s body of work:
A distinctive combination of expressive symbolism and naivist morphology, resulting in the creation of an idiosyncratic visual idiom, characterized by contrasting effects in various shades of blue and yellow – which are often compositionally emphasized by the existence of a high view point and, associated therewith, exceptional distance and vastness – rendering countless variations of the pictorial elements nature, architecture and the human figure, accentuated by the depiction of twilight (dusk, dawn and night versus moonlight, as well as snow, respectively water, versus blazing fire) conduces to the artistic exploration of the imminence of death and fate.
Thus the upcoming Exhibition NEW YEAR, NEW ME is going to provide you with the rare, even unique opportunity to experience and enjoy the mesmerising momentum of amazement, pleasurable and delightful challenges by immersing yourself in a plethora of visual idioms and the stunning visual worlds which these artist create.
Perhaps you have found yourself exceedingly fascinated by a particular oeuvre when visiting previous exhibitions at our gallery, if so, you now you may pursue this fascination and intensify the artistic encounter, or even discover the work of artists previously unknown to you, whicht might even result in your discovering entirely new fascinations…
