CONTEMPORARY STILL LIFE October 15 - November 2 2012

Erwin Bohatsch, Herbert Brandl, Seiichi Furuya, Robert van der Hilst, Christian KRI Kammerhofer, Rudi Molacek, Fritz Panzer, Anton Petz, Gerwald Rockenschaub, Hubert Schmalix, Maria Serebriakova, Margriet Smulders, Tjalf Sparnaay

With its obeisance to the profane and pleasurable, the still life has always been seen as an interface between art and life. The mundane is imbued with an aesthetic dimension, which often encompasses the representation of time and its transience.

Often reviled by art history due to its seeming renunciation of intellectual rigour. For that precise reason, artists who wanted to delineate themselves from the stiff dictate of the academy rediscovered the still life in the 19th century. When the scope of panel painting became inadequate for the artistic demands of the 20th century, the development of constructive art expanded the domain of the still life to include haptic experience. The current diversity in art provides a broad spectrum of media: many a glorious oil painting is actually a photograph and tender graphics become objects; sensual representations of nature turn out to be adapted forms of Nature Morte as an unerring critique of human destruction and concrete technoid compositions are nothing but remnants of a memory of an arrangement of objects and its transformation.

Contemporary debates in this field reach far beyond the commonly conditioned conception of the genre, from the representation of caged life – very much in terms of time and its passage – via the sensual adaptation of well-known works, to the revaluation of waste as a glorification of the profane. This exhibition explores the possibilities of contemporary forms of expression in this field using examples from Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, France and China to show the ways in which the concept of the still life is being adapted for current artistic enquiries.
Manuela Schlossinger