ARCO MADRID 2022

With their booth concept for the ARCO, Gallery Krobath creates a convincing and compelling exhibition setting, where various artistic positions and different generations enter into an intriguing dialogue with one another. The common theme is a reduced

and yet powerful visual language that produces a harmonious entity, despite all the differences. The paintings presented here are somewhere between the poles of self-reference and non- representational reality, but they also question their own nature, use digital techniques and push the boundaries of the second dimension. Elegant surfaces meet playful lines (Elsa Alberti, Sebastian Koch), clean, geometrical forms meet schematic figurations (Gerwald Rockenschaub, Julian Opie), complex grid patterns in black and white meet multi-coloured circles and sculptures (Esther Stocker, Ugo Rondinone).

Elisa Alberti‘s paintings depict simple geometric forms and mellow monochrome fields. With stylistic confidence, she creates rectangular forms with smooth curves and almost transparent layers of paint. Sebastian Koch’s work, too, is a mixture of a very individual style and distant artistic form. The dainty, entwined lines indicate a confident mind, and yet remain vague and ambiguous. The lines are set on a monochrome background both in a clear and playful manner.

Gerwald Rockenschaub was a member of the Neo-Geo movement in the 1980s that set strict geometric forms in multi-coloured fields against expressive painting. Using a special software, he creates abstract forms on his computer, which are printed on coloured foils and laminated on aluminium plates. As industrially produced paintings, these artworks reduce the artist’s handwriting to a minimum. Julian Opie, too, uses digital means to create highly stylised, but figurative images. In his unique manner, he combines minimalist and Pop Art with a contemporary visual language, thus creating pictogram-like portraits or (animal) figures with broad outlines and abstract landscapes consisting of various colour fields.

Esther Stocker’s artistic world consists of very few geometric basic forms. The deconstruction of the seemingly exact form serves as the starting point for her black- and-white paintings. The artist creates manifold variations of slightly offset grid and arrangement systems. She sometimes takes them to the third dimension and forms fascinating objects by wrinkling or folding the geometrical black-and-white patterns. Ugo Rondinone explores the boundaries of painting as a medium and our perception

of it through concentrically arranged circles with vibrating colour combinations or colourful, highly artificial installations. His mountain sculptures painted in fluorescent colours symbolize his constant interest in natural phenomena and their physical and aesthetical interpretation.

Günther Oberhollenzer
Curator State Gallery of Lower Austria