Elisa Alberti . Michael Bauch . Theresa Eipeldauer . Sebastian Koch . Fritz Panzer

15.04.–28.05.2021

ELISA ALBERTI
1992 born in Kiel (D), grown up in Bruneck (IT). Lives and works in Vienna, (A).

Elisa Alberti is quoted as saying “my paintings convey a specific situation”. The Viennese artist with both German and Italian roots realises works in which simple geometrical shapes and gentle monochrome surfaces abound. Within a few years, Alberti has developed an individual and recognisable style of her own: a reduced, minimal repertoire of shapes combined with harmonious colours and curved, softly rounded forms. She stringently repeats elements from painting to painting in both acrylics and enamel paint on either canvas or wood; often large format pieces, but sometimes also smaller pieces, in series of works. Alberti also realises extensive spatial installations as a dialogue between two- and three-dimensionality in an experimental, well thought through manner.
The specific geometrical order of colour surfaces and the aesthetic that it evokes reminds viewers of Concrete Art, a movement that attempted, after WW II, to allow art to make a fresh start. Constructive, Concrete artists reject figurative tendencies evident in Austrian Expressionism; they rather focussed on lines, surfaces and colour in their art, usually guided by geometry. Marc Adrian, Richard Kriesche and Helga Philipp accorded attention to the issue of the viewers’ role, prioritising how art is perceived, to various aspects of surfaces and textures. The Neo Geo movement (new geometry) also picked up on these ideas in the 1980s in works by, for example, Dora Maurer and Gerwald Rockenschaub. Neo-Geo artists provided a stark contrast to the quick, wild figurative painting of the Jungen Wilden; use of rigorously geometric shapes in colour fields to counter figurative trends. At the same time, their shared interest in new ways of creating compositions through geometry, in how space is experienced and perceived, lead to a variety of artistic strategies.
From: Günther Oberhollenzer „Elisa Alberti. The possibilities that simple forms provide“, 2021.


MICHAEL BAUCH
1951 born in Hamburg (D). Lives and works in Hamburg (D).

Michael Bauch’s paintings are signifying procedures towards form. His works are concentrations of a praxis with the material, here with canvas, primer and paint, through which Bauch has been specifying his understanding of what is painterly since the mid of the 1980s. However object-like his works are encountered by their audience, their specificity is a painterly one. But still, Bauch’s principle is not one of composition, but of action, a practical approach towards the canvas, contouring its space in a first approach with seemingly accidental, repetitive movements of drawing, to therein find forms, which are than elaborated and cleared. The intensive chromaticity, which Bauch applies to his paintings in the course of their development, can be identified as yet another differentiating step within this process of materialization.
In Bauch’s paintings history is no tone of conoisseur-like referentialism but much rather an imprint of the history of the gaze. In this case, it is the impressions of the 1950s as much as the 80s, forms of Abstract Expressionism or early British Pop Art, which here return without either gestural monumentalism or informal tragic. One begins to wonder if also the present occupies a discrete chromaticity and form, if it may consist in these intersections of the times, from the ongoing repetition, actualization and shifting of which contemporary art is made – or if it will step into the foreground only in retrospect, carved out, just as in Bauch’s painterly work with his material, in a form of open art history of the painterly gaze. Bauch paints painting as an artistic struggle within its
material.
From: Pressinformation, Kobath Wien, 2012.


THERESA EIPELDAUER
1985 born in Vienna (A). Lives and works in Vienna, (A).

Eipeldauer’s time in Paris studying lithography marked the beginning of a fascination with printed graphics which has lasted for many years. Her current works are based on drawings: écriture automatique scribbles are sent through a digital process including scanning and glitching, then filtered on the computer, transformed and linked in a composition. A selection of the resulting graphics is then transferred onto previously painted canvasses using a silk-screen process. By painting the canvas by hand, Eipeldauer draws on classical concepts of painting, but by negating the brush in her next step, she bypasses these concepts rather than touching them: the pigment is applied indirectly by using a screen and blade.
Eipeldauer creates a poetic approach to visual elements: she builds up tensions (“vibrations”) by scanning, modifying and juxtaposing formal properties. She focuses and multiplies the lines, thus suggesting three-dimensionality. Overlapping lines make some parts of the picture flicker; contrasts and repetitions help to create spaces and objects. In her works, the artist often uses visual elements such as writing and language. Typographic vibrations create structures and non-spaces, which cannot exist through language. The playful approach to the form ultimately leads to visual ambivalence, to intimations and openness to interpretation.
For Eipeldauer, picture compositions mainly mean “Arrangement of Incidents” – and the title of the exhibition is an acronym of this phrase. Doubt is the driving force behind the artistic approach and the decisions are based on both emotional and formal considerations: the position of the print, the chosen surface, the number of coats of primer and pigments. Colour characteristics. Eipeldauer thus develops a sensitivity for materials which touches on the original essence of painting: What is painting? And what does it mean to me?
From: Christian Bazant-Hegemark, „Theresa Eipeldauer, A /O /I, Krobath Wien, 2018.


SEBASTIAN KOCH
1986 born in Vorarlberg (A). Lives and works in Vienna, (A).

There is a certain humor in Sebastian Koch's definition of the line in his paintings. The line is disturbing the surface, it creates a dialogue between the surface of the canvas and the line and is also creating space in the painting. He is drawing the line until the associative potential is taking over the surface and is creating some references 'outside' of the canvas. Lines are somehow becoming signs which we cannot read literally as something known or concrete. But we are getting into some idea of these forms even if they remain enigmatic at all.
In his works, Sebastian Koch does not apply a reductionist approach, abstracting certain forms from a given reference model. His works do not represent the painstaking reproduction of a model, be it in nature or in art. Nor are they the result of a constant testing of the artistic medium for the sake of it. For Koch, everything is material and as a result his approach is rather playful. However, he does not differentiate between artistic material, conceptual material and the actual material with which the paintings (and modern sculpture) are created, namely paint, wood, frame, canvas etc. Of course it goes without saying that he is in a constant dialogue with art. For as soon as he makes even the slightest intrusion into the painting medium, the game begins and with it the burden of representation. Painting and the discourse thereof has developed enough since the beginning of the 20th century to be ripe with subjects for discussion.
From: Harald Krejci „Sebastian Koch. „schlingfiester“, Krobath Wien 2020.


FRITZ PANZER
1945 born in Judenburg (A). Lives and works in Vienna, (A).

The works of Fritz Panzer refer to everyday life, from which he takes quotidian objects and depicts them in his drawings, paintings or sculptures. Ranging from a kitchen or a car to lamps, shoeboxes or milk cartons, Panzer examines these objects from his own private universe in order to fathom their formal structure. The outlines of the objects are reduced to the essentials and, in recent years, Panzer has introduced varying degrees of abstraction into his work, only alluding certain forms.
The distinguishing point between Panzer’s drawings and his paintings is the fact that colour is frequently a prominent feature of his paintings, while he keeps his pencil drawings purely abstract and in black and white. The extensive use of colour in the paintings creates geometrically abstract layers of colour, eclipsing the reality of the depicted objects and makes the concrete form of the objects only discernible as ephemeral structures. Unlike the paintings, the linearity of the pencil drawings are a direct reference to the wire sculptures, since their characteristic style corresponds to the wire lines and the minimal use of black lines on a white surface adds a spatial element to the drawings.
From: Walter Seidl, Pressetext zu Fritz Panzer, Krobath Wien, 2014.