JAKOB GASTEIGER | OTTO ZITKO

vernissage
On Saturday, 18. September at 17:00
Introduction by Günther Holler-Schuster, Universalmuseum Joanneum Graz

EXHIBITION until 6 November 2021, Mon – Sat 10.00 – 18.00 Sun by
appointment 0664 26 45 975

JAKOB GASTEIGER

1954 born in Salzburg

1970-1974 University of Music and Performing Arts, Salzburg
1990 Faistauer Prize for Painting
1995 prize winner, 24th Austrian Graphic Competition Innsbruck
1999 26th Austrian Graphic Competition Innsbruck, Prize of the Provincial Capital Innsbruck
2017 Appreciation Award for Fine Arts of the Province of Lower Austria
2019 Grand Decoration of Honor for services to the province of Lower Austria

Jakob Gasteiger is considered a representative of analytical painting. In his works, he questions parameters of painting and thematizes, expands and breaks through the boundaries of graphics, painting and sculpture. The most extensive and at the same time best-known group of the artist’s works are his mostly monochrome paintings with relief-like structures, which are formed by the use of a comb spatula when applying the paint to the picture’s background. Within this working process, color is not used by Gasteiger as a carrier of content or meaning, but as a material per se. The comb spatula is Gasteiger’s tool. It replaces the brush and makes it possible to work without personal handwriting in the sense of a mechanical process.

Text excerpt: Karin Schwarz-Hönig

OTTO ZITKO

1959 born in Linz, Austria
1977-1982 University of Applied Arts Vienna
1996 Msgr. Otto Mauer Prize
2004 Prize of the City of Vienna for Visual Arts
2017 Cultural Prize for Visual Arts of the Province of Upper Austria

When Otto Zitko stopped painting at the end of the 1980s, this did not have the character of a manifesto – according to the motto “painting is dead for me, too”; it did not mean turning away from painting and seemingly overcoming it, but rather in this decision, paradoxically, the self-critically purified reason to be able to continue painting only in this way: namely, in the pursuit of the line. The artist was not concerned with a graphism as a fundamentalist ideology after all painting, but Zitko uses the long path of the line (title of a drawing from 1987) to leave a trace before all painting. He put his priority in drawing, which is for him the current form of painting, in the flowing continuous line, but excludes thereby to give a final rejection to conventional painting.

Text excerpt: Herbert Lachmayr