ANDREAS LEIKAUF | VERONIKA SUSCHNIG | JOSEF WURM

ANDREAS LEIKAUF

* 1966 in Judenburg
Studied painting and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna

Andreas Leikauf is known for his expressive paintings, which use striking motifs and catchy slogans to capture the spirit of the times as it manifests itself in film, fashion, music and lifestyle. Over the years, he has developed an unmistakable style in which he uses a more or less vibrant colour tone with a matte black dispersion to depict selected scenes from our visual culture. He always adds a phrase, slogan or aphorism to the image, which has become a kind of trademark. This creates an image-text relationship that evokes a narrative that is as associative as it is enigmatic, as open as it is hermetic. (Roman Grabner)

VERONIKA SUSCHNIG

1989 * in Korneuburg
2020-22 Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Sculpture, Text Sculpture
2017-22 Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Painting, Extended Pictorial Space
2015-20 Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Art & Architecture – Master Degree
2012-15 Vienna University of Technology, Architecture – Bachelor

Gauze is a flat woven knitted fabric made of cotton. It is used to bandage and bind wounds, for polishing in intaglio printing and in Veronika Suschnig’s complex work ‘Soft Skills’, which has been running since 2019.
Behind the seemingly transparent ideas of ‘Soft Skills’ lies a complex working process. Ink drawings are mirrored from analogue to digital space, where they are distorted by superimposition and displacement, only to find their way back to the gauze-covered stretcher frame by means of screen printing, where the acrylic paint is pressed pastose through the grid of the fabric, creating an inimitable three-dimensional effect. The stretcher frame remains visible, foreground and background alternate and dissolve. The three-dimensional and expansive thinking, which is essential in all of Suschnig’s series, also stems from his preoccupation with architecture. (Paula Watzl)

JOSEF WURM

1984 * in Fürstenfeld
1999 to 2002 at the HTBLA Ortwein/Graphics and Design
2013 – 2020 as a freelance artist in Budapest

Josef Wurm turns the joints and threads of the world that hold together the romantic key points of gloom and everyday life. Fearless colours and a bold calm dwell on the canvases, in which noble spirits and mad admirals, tame beasts and lost faces incessantly transform each other. The images are tilted and the meanings shatter before our eyes, but the aesthetic remains. Wounds and miracles, dreams and ruins cannot be distinguished from one another and Wurm paints the thousand faces behind the masks, heaven and human flesh as if they were the same thing. He burrows earthily into the beautiful bowels of the world and doesn’t take reality too seriously. The delicate circus madness gapes at the paper, the memento mori does not admonish but excites, the figures starve and starve at the world, and finally the viewer’s gaze finds the pictures as if he were going home. (Valerie Fritsch)