SOFT OPENING on Saturday 17 April and Sunday 18 April from 11:00 to 18:00.

the Corona Regulations will be observed.

exhibition until 10 June 2021 Mon – Sat from 10:00 to 18:00, Sun by appointment

JOSEF KERN
from life

JOSEF WURM
S p a c e  f o r  y o u n g  a r t

Exhibition until 10 June 2021 Mon – Sat from 10:00 to 18:00, Sun by appointment

JOSEF KERN

from life

Josef Kern has been one of the most important representatives of
figurative painting in Austria since the late 1970s. Together with
Hubert Schmalix, Alois Mosbacher and Siegfried Anzinger, whose painting
is also characterised by representationalism, he was one of the main
representatives of the "New Painting" in Austria.
Sensuality, vitality and eroticism, these were also impulses that were
to lead out of conceptual art into the pictorial new painting. Kern
undoubtedly tries to generate eroticism from painting. The act of
painting is often equated with the sexual act. The blossoms and fruits
are the sexual organs of the plants, the photographer Robert
Mapplethorpe was sure.
In the sculptures carved from wood, the human body is combined with
vegetal forms. The impression of the exoticism of distant cultures and
the surreal are close at hand. The reliefs are characterised in the same
way by the ornamentality of the floral motif and by the sensuality of
the forms, which bulge plumply out of the two-dimensionality of the
picture and develop an even greater delicacy in the three-dimensionality
of the sculptural.
Josef Kern later pursued more of a surreal pictorial invention. This
approach of the fantastic, the ornamental, where once again the vegetal
is combined with the corporeal, has a long history in Austria since Art
Nouveau.
Kern thus combines in his work essential traditions of painting, such as
Expressionism, Realism and Surrealism, but is able to place this very
skilfully in a present that we recognise. Thus his painting is by no
means backward-looking, but is an expression of vital existence - from life.

Günther Holler-Schuster

1953 Born in Schiefer, Styria
1972-79 Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

Museum exhibitions
at Belvedere Palace Vienna, DOK NÖ St. Pölten, Museum Liaunig Neuhaus,
Kunsthalle Vienna, Kunsthaus Mürz Mürzzuschlag, Lentos Art Museum Linz,
Leopold Museum Vienna, Musèe d' Art Contemporain Lyon, MUMOK Vienna,
Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn, Rupertinum
Salzburg, Salford Museum Manchester, Museion Bozen, Austrian Cultural
Forum Belgrade
Gallery exhibitions in Baden, Bolzano, Fürstenfeld, Graz, Istanbul, Los
Angeles, Salzburg and Vienna

Josef Kern

Untitled

2021, oil on canvas, 50 x 65 cm

Josef Kern

Untitled

2021, oil on canvas, 50 x 65 cm

Josef Kern

Tulip drama

2020, Oil on canvas, 68 x 99 cm

Josef Kern

Yellow-brown iris

2020, Oil on canvas, 98 x 53 cm

Josef Kern

Well protected

2021, lime wood, wax, 37 x 24 x 4.5 cm

Josef Kern

Untitled

2021, oil on canvas, 50 x 65 cm

Josef Kern

Shield and irises

2020, Oil on canvas, 65 x 50 cm

Josef Kern

On hot stones

2021, oil on canvas, 150 x 210 cm

Josef Kern

On the move

2021, oil on canvas, 180 x 60 cm

Josef Kern

Plant origin

2019, lime wood, wax, 31 x 44.5 x 4 cm

Josef Kern

Untitled

2021, oil on canvas, 50 x 65 cm

Josef Kern

Untitled

2021, oil on canvas, 50 x 65 cm

JOSEF WURM

Space for young art

Josef Wurm turns those 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 admirals sated with madness, tame beasts and lost faces ceaselessly
transform each other.
The images are tilting pictures and the meanings break before the eyes,
but the aesthetics remain. Wounds and miracles, dreams and ruins cannot
be distinguished from each other and Wurm paints the thousand faces
behind the masks, sky and human flesh, as if they were the same. He
burrows earthily into the beautiful bowels of the world and does not
take reality too seriously.
The delicate circus madness gapes at the paper, the memento mori does
not admonish but excites, the figures hunger on and starve of the world,
and finally the viewer's gaze finds the images as if going home.  

Valerie Fritsch

1984 born in Fürstenfeld
1999 to 2002 at the HTBLA Ortwein|Graphics and Design, Graz
Since 2010 freelance artist, from 2013 to 2020 in Budapest,
now lives and works in Austria again.

Museum exhibitions
at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, Künstlerhaus Vienna, Kunsthalle
Graz, Kunsthaus Mürz Mürzzuschlag, OKK (Austrian Cultural Forum) Budapest.
Gallery exhibitions in Berlin, Budapest, Teleki, Graz and Vienna.

Josef Wurm

Untitled

2021, mixed media on canvas, 200 x 300 cm

Josef Wurm

LIFE

2021, mixed media on canvas, 100 x 80 cm

Josef Wurm

MOW

2021, mixed media on canvas, 100 x 80 cm