Opening on Friday, 23rd of June 2017, 6 pm, Hauptplatz 6, 8010 Graz
Exhibition in cooperation with STYRIARTE 2017
Duration until 22nd if July 2017
Introduktion by Mathis Huber & Manuela Schlossinger

In cooperation with the music festival STYRIARTE, which takes place under the banner theme ‘The Dance of Life’ this year, the Austrian gallery Reinisch Contemporary pays homage to the PLEASURE OF COLOUR.

The show evolves around the subdomain of Austrian art that captures emotional moments through colour, expressive painting and individual mythologies. The young artists’ generation of the New Wild (Neue Wilde) precipitated the rebirth of a genre already declared dead at the time, namely, painting. The passion for and joy of painting took centre stage and gave rise to a new painterly intensity in Austria, which lasts through to this day.
Among the selected works are wholly different approaches as to how colour can be used to convey emotion.

The works of Herbert Brandl conjure up visions of cataclysmic natural events, with untamed colour formations sliding across the canvas. Always taking tangible experiences of nature as a point of departure, he attempts to capture their raw, elementary energy with characteristically broad brush-strokes.

Conversely, Wolfgang Hollegha’s gestic painting asserts itself, diaphanous on white backdrops, with a subtle yet powerful constancy. The artist gradually abstracts or, rather, transforms real objects until they dissolve into movement.

Anton Petz’ paintings, on the other hand, appear significantly more representational, with coloured areas making up figures. His subjects of enquiry are, primarily, the human being, the portrait (as currently on show at the Joanneum), crowds, as well as the places and situations that cause people to congregate.

Less concerned with areas than with contours, Alfred Klinkan develops whimsical worlds of colour. Populated by luminous mythical creatures, his paintings reveal personal mythologies. As a trailblazer of the New Wild painters, he was using an unconventional colour palette to create seminal, highly recognisable, large-format works by the early 1970s.

 In contrast to these seemingly ‘mad’ whirls of colour, the works of Christoph Schmidberger, the latest addition to Reinisch Contemporary, are reminiscent of the Renaissance, creating incredibly realistic paintings through the exaggeration of characters. Only at first glance do they seem like photorealistic paintings. Flooded by light and near-transcendental, the quality of this lyrical painting style turns out to be a distinct, narrative reality created by the artist.

Different as these approaches may seem, these artists all share a tangible pleasure in painting and a commitment to colour. PLEASURE OF COLOUR – EMOTION IN MOTION runs concurrent with STYRIARTE 2017.

Manuela Schlossinger