rauminhalt_harald bichler
space & content

Jakob Gasteiger (born 1953 in Salzburg) is one of the most important Austrian contemporary painters and is considered a representative of analytical painting. In his works he questions the parameters of painting and thematizes, expands and breaks through the boundaries of graphics and painting as well as painting and sculpture.

The most extensive and at the same time probably best-known group of the artist's works are his monochrome paintings with relief-like structures, which are created by using a comb spatula when applying the paint on the painting surface. Within this working process, Gasteiger does not use paint as a carrier of content or meaning, but as a material per se. It serves the artist, among other things, to investigate questions of color materials and the boundaries between non-color and color. The comb spatula is Gasteiger's tool. It replaces the brush and, as he points out himself, enables the artist to work without personal handwriting and in the sense of a mechanical process.
 

Since the end of 2018, the artist has been expanding this group of works with the use of neon colours, which accentuate the relief-like structures of these compositions in a new way. The new colour spectrum is now also used for the round format that Gasteiger has already tried and tested for a long time. In the context of the exhibition, 2 of his newly created large-format circular  paintings in neon colours will be presented for the first time.

(Translation of the original German text by Karin Schwarz-Hönig)

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