Imagine Space

Imagine Space

Barbara Höller | Guido Kucsko
Manfred Makra | Josef A. Moser | Franz Riedl

Thursday, April 27, 7:00 p.m.
Opening: Vitus H. Weh, art critic and exhibition organizer

Imagine a space where you can think. Create a space of thought. As suggested by the title of this exhibition, this is exactly what visitors are invited to do.

Exhibition organizer Vitus H. Weh believes that the paradox of Imagine Space is the interconnection of panel painting and the contrary tradition of spatial presence, that is, distant panel paintings on the subject of space.

The moment you step inside the entrance hall, Manfred Makra’s wall paintings and wall objects, which were created especially for this exhibition and specific space, make the spatial surroundings oscillate before your eyes, evoking an atmosphere of both elegance and spirituality.

Barbara Höller, on the other hand, focuses purely on the material. In the process of her artistic work, polyester or aluminum serve as a painting support over which she creates courses of lines that seem almost magical. Silver-colored overlapping on tonally adjusted aquamarine color fields attune us to her masterly drawings in which she superimposes and alters the angle of the lines to create structures that appear to be in motion.

Franz Riedl creates masterful art by making incisions in cardboard. Captivating to the viewer, his incisions and reliefs are sometimes so dense and deep that they create new perspectives with the quality of stage sets, which, even without lighting, open the observer’s mind. The validation of this approach may be seen in a work dedicated to the great architect Friedrich Kiesler.

Riedl shares a “spiritual” space with Josef A. Moser, whose object-like installations challenge our conventional perceptions and take us to magical realms. Pure-white objects become radiant when set off against painted fields applied in primary colors to rear surfaces. There they are reflected by the white surfaces behind them, and the variously colored reflections blend together. They imbue the space with special energy, giving the viewer new strength for everyday life.

Guido Kucsko’s work, a series of ten framed black panels, create conceptual spaces, while consuming the room through their presence. Instead of the usual flat black panels, Kucsko uses aluminum boards, creased and painted in black, to structure the space in his 10 upcoming ideas. Of course, the pun that confuses “plain” and “plane” in the sense of flat is essential, and thus he concludes the series with a wall painting featuring the words: “I’m sick and tired of being plane!”