In its next exhibition, starting on Saturday, September 14th, 2024, the gallery twenty-six will present an enticing selection of works by various artists, such as Alice Ella, Kryštof Strejc, Christian Bazant-Hegemark, Franziska Schemel, Robert W. Sackl-Kahr Sagostin, Beáta Hechtová, Wolfgang Uranitsch, Jaroslav Valečka, Torun Tek and many more.
These works captivate not only by the radical diversity of artistic approaches, the range there is – stylistically as well as in form and content – but above all by their directness, strong presence, vigour and vital freshness, which – in the synergy of these visual worlds – entice exhibition visitors, creating a veritable suction effect that lures the beholders, almost magically attracts, even draws them in, with every glance, every look…
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.
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 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.
Kryštof Strejc creates a truly astonishing visual idiom: audacious pieces of art, radiating a distinct resolute energy and vivacity – witty and somehow outrageous, a bit predatory looking even, in strong, even brash, colors, that go their own surprising ways, making for a new kind of visual energy with an allegorical flavour. His complex chimeras (seemingly drawn from the artist‘s private mythologies) celebrate the connection between human and animal, whereby mutuality is apparent at all levels: blending dog and fish imagery with human traits and characteristics, so that fish have human lips, while dogs are dressed and wear shoes.
Strejc‘s works do have a certain dark quality, which is revealed paradoxically by the way the bright shades, clear colors and pop culture references in theses large format paintings manage to convey subliminal smidgens of apocalyptic narratives, nestled in the timelessness of reality, of the here and now, undermining the fact, that the present we live in is not too distant from the narrative in question …
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.
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.
Graphic black-and-white everyday impressions of eccentricity in all its forms, consistently formally quite deliberately exaggerated, almost cartoonishly implemented. These are the main features of Torun Tek‘s oeuvre.
Thus, in a visual idiom clearly influenced by street art and comics (panels as the dominant element of the image composition, with their edges clearly set off in terms of the graphic design; hints of speedlines to illustrate movement dynamics), the artist subverts concepts such as “everyday,” “normal,” or “expectable” and, quite incidentally, exposes apparent banality as mere conglomeration of bizarreness.
The artist justifies the conscious decision for this great visual density and the reduction to black and white with his being intrigued with the field of tension between private cipher and iconography, which invites the viewers to engage in active, co-creative unraveling, in projecting their own cognitions, emotions, associations and questions – and thus perhaps also their very own imagined coloration into his works of art.
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 Selected Works Exhibition 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 other artists previously unknown to you, whicht might even result in your discovering entirely new fascinations…
