Find out more about our current exhibitions
MONIKA KUS-PICCO
MEDIZINBILDER. 2019 - 2020
The museum Angerlehner hosts the first Austria-wide museum-like solo exhibition of MonikaKus-Picco until February 21st, 2021.
Since 2018, in the run-up to the exhibition in Paris, Monika Kus-Picco has worked exclusively with medicine as hues for her partly large-sized, partly medium-sized paintings. “Expired” medicinal products and liquids are used instead of industrially produced paints and colors mostly on a white base. This gives the paintings a completely new range of colors and an intriguing inner tension. And, by the way, emerge like canvas of the classic tradition and of the modern tradition of abstraction.
The fact that it is about “painted” medicine or painting with medicine is always visually present to the beholder and produces a highly intensive pictorial art.
These up to now unknown hues that apparently come from this non-painting starting point make up a new form of beauty.
The exhibition was being planned for quite some time. Due to the current medical and sanitary crisis it obtains a tremendous topicality.
MARTIN pRASKA
SHORT STORIES
In the graphic rooms of the upper floor oil paintings by Martin Praska from the last ten years are displayed.
Praska is a master of figuration and representationalism. Meticulous is his execution – with soft flaws, plays of light and shadow and hightlights. All the more the depicted subjects contrast with the ambience, the diffuse spaces and landscapes. He paints abstractly, messes around and rages expressively, calculates precisely, blends and accentuates subtly.
And just like Praska draws from different styles, equally unrestrainedly he borrows from art history. Caravaggio is cited, just as Rubens, Ingres and Dürer. The old masters are shaken and stirred until a new cocktail of contemporary painting is ready for degustation. Needless to say that nothing is plain and simple here.
The works are of sophisticated complexity and have developed over years, as well as gone ways and wrongs ways, the artist himself explains. Of course, these paintings are narrational and polysemous. Because of this, they are all but easily intelligible and quickly categorizable.
MARIO dALPRA
BE INSPIRED. SKULPTUR UND MALEREI
The gallery rooms show the sculptural and pictorial works by Mario Dalpra. The artist’s fascinating sculptures are colorful bio-, zoo- and anthropomorphic creatures with oftentimes amazingly flexible and limber bodies. The artist, born in Vorarlberg and resident in Vienna and India, skillfully plays on the claviature of a philosophic-minimalistic art experience.
Already the exhibition’s title “Be Inspired” anticipates the artist’s philosophy and message: “The freedom of art, offering the beholder a purely individual and collective art experience without compulsion concerning concept and installation which is detached from the diction of the art market and an art-scientific interpretation.
“Be Inspired” is the answer to our hectic and overloaded world, the greed for consumption and constant entertainment of which gives rise to alienation – within ourselves and in the interaction with “the other”.
Dalpra’s works place a special emphasis on sensations, joy and the discussion of aesthetics of surfaces. He does not remain short on a reflective response to a current hurtful and disturbing world.
Billi Thanner
ART VIRUS
Since 13 February the Museum Angerlehner shows the salon-exhibition “Art Virus” with the Viennese neo-performance-artist Billi Thanner. The performance “Art Obsession”, which was especially designed for and will be accompanying the exhibition, is staged during the time of the exhibition. Besides sculptures also paintings by Thanner are displayed in the exhibition.
Exhibition– Art Virus
Already in 2007, after a visit to an art fair, Billi Thanner came up with the idea of designing art viruses in the form of sculptures. “There should be viruses that question pseudo-art”, so the artist.
Billi Thanner’s viruses appear harmless. Based on their rigorous array in an “Art Army” in combat formation, an art army evolves that promises cure and a regenerated view of the true art works. Their humanised appearance is not random, but engenders confidence between the beholder and the object. An infection is inevitable, meaningful involvement with art is possible again.
Billi Thanner stresses the area, but not only for herself: with the current exhibition she incorporates friends and embarks on a joint art trip.
Three pieces each by Julius Deutschbauer and Peter Lohmeyer are shown. In addition – partly large-sized – works from the new series “2020” by Billi Thanner are presented in the Salon.
There will be a catalogue published for the exhibition.
Curator of the exhibition: Tanja Prušnik