TONE FINK | RENATE KRAMMER

TONE FINK

* January 1, 1944 in Schwarzenberg, Vorarlberg

Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts (under Prof. Weiler and Melcher) in Vienna.

Tone Fink scribbles and glues, he cuts and spatulas, he layers and grinds and writes something on it, he scratches, tears, perforates the paper, he makes and builds objects and performs with them and is filmed in the process and creates films himself.

And finally, he also does something surprisingly conventional: he draws and paints. And sometimes, as a teacher, he passes on what he does. A phrase by Joseph Beys is important to him: “Art=human=creativity=freedom.” And further: art is “revolt”, ‘riot’, “anarchy”, Tone Fink quotes great artists of the 20th century. And he sticks to it. The artist has childish traits. And just because he takes art particularly seriously, he pretends that he doesn’t take it particularly seriously. But that is deceptive.

To conclude: Tone Fink has exhibited his work in Beijing, Cairo, Berlin, Tokyo, Prague and elsewhere.

(Text excerpt Dr. Peter Huemer)

RENATE KRAMMER

* 1956 in Klein St. Paul, Carinthia

Has been working with painting, graphics, video, installation and photography since 1989. Four semesters of artistic design as part of architectural studies with Giselbert Hoke. Summer Academy for Fine Arts, Salzburg, Rivka Rinn. Training with Helmut Helmessen, Hans Staudacher, Paul Rotterdam and Rebecca LittleJohn, among others.

Exhibitions in Austria, Switzerland, Slovenia, Germany and France.

Slow, monotonous structures that take on a life of their own and are repeated in lines. Renate Krammer draws the always horizontal lines with a free hand. Density and thickness as well as length and the distance between them are the only creative elements. What the artist once sought in drawing was formlessness, which, despite strict reduction, has by no means materialized – rather, a new cosmos of forms has emerged. As with the binary code, which gets by with 0 and 1, everything seems to be expressible through horizontal lines – rhythm, movement, space, light, writing.

(Günther Holler -Schuster)