Franziska Maderthaner - shaken, not stirred
13. August 2008, 14:05:21 unter: Austria, German, Podcasts, Portraits, Video, ViennaPicture for yourself reality. Is that reality immediate, direct, unexpected? Should we attribute this power of reality to something within the medium or to the medium itself? Reality, realized as a procedure of exclusion, as an attempt at reduction, has reigned over the scientific and artistic arguments that have existed over centuries. In the last twentieth century, this gateway was submerged in the continually rising flood of the everyday vocabulary of visual art.
The influence of this radical change on the work of the painter Franziska Maderthaner is visible. Instead of reduction, construction, de- and re-construction, and bricolage prevail. Instead of strict exclusion, surplus of meaning. Instead of the pathos of one, a play with references with which to assemble and compose.
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The work of Franziska Maderthaner is hyperreal, sampled, and assembled. For this painter, to realize means to gather, to paint, to piece together various media, styles, content, and techniques — that is the way to go. We as viewers realize what occurs to us as impressions and images through composition and assemblage. This process of assimilation is the work, theme, experiment, and suggestion of the painter. Rules of style — from either figurative or abstract painting — do not interest her. In the end, as Maderthaner puts it, it is all just paint on a canvas.
Now, back to reality. Who are you — you, who has created this reality? You are a multitude of entities, an entire array of assembled narratives, which, when joined together, could be addressed in any number of ways: Franziska Maderthaner, Lou Rosenblatt …, (wh/jn)
