The early work of Nadine Rennert can be considered abstract art. It explores the formal possibilities of its material. It plumbs the depths of its soul, says the artist.

The work of the Berlin-based artist has moved lately more in the direction of figurative art. The use of materials such as fleece, wool, leather, skin or down remains the same, as well as the approach of trying to find what lies within the raw material, within its soul. What has changed is that the material of her work must now be understood in a broader sense. Individual sentences in the form of statements and situations from stories and fairy tales have been added. more »

Maria Lassnig: “Soft as marmalade, marmalade out of blood I’m batted and feel hindered and left locked out from the world of painting.”

“There was a saying, if a boy is born, parents drink a schnapps, but if it is a girl they would only celebrate with water or even less … nothing”, recollects Maria Lassnig in one of her recently numerous interviews

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Born in 1919 she started to scribble her first artworks at a very young age. Once her mother even seeked the help of a fortune teller because her little girl was holding her hands in such a crooked way while drawing, that she looked like a fool. Although her mother was told to support her daughter, her only thought was to get her married to a decent man to keep her out of harm’s way. more »

With her work, says the Canadian artist Karine Giboulo, she would like to leave behind an impression of the world. That is, her impression. The common thread in the works of this artist is her viewpoint. Giboulo looks closely at those things which do not lie directly before her eyes. Her view refuses to be influenced by the power strategies which aim at holding the world in an overview so that one need not see it in precise detail and can look away so as not to get so emotionally involved. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman identified such an overview—the social production of moral invisibility—as an intentional strategy of our modern, global world. Giboulo’s view points in a reverse direction. It concentrates on the particular, focusing in on things in detail, thereby identifying the effects of these overviews and strategies of looking away.

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Giboulo’s work consists of miniature worlds: 3D views of fast food restaurant parking lots, living rooms, advertising themes, factory halls…all assembled from intricately detailed Plasticine figures. Her childlike representation of the adult world, sometimes reinforced even more by the stylistic use of fairy-tale personification, is disarming. Such art can be so endearing and frank, in the same way children are, who will tell you to your face that from which you would rather look away. more »

For a long time, contemporary art was strictly a national phenomenon in Turkey and was therefore, to a large extent, ignored internationally. This has changed. In the 1970s and 80s, artists such as Füsun Onur, Ayse Erkmen, Gülsün Karamustafa, Hale Tenger have begun to break through traditional and national orientations and to bring in international influences. As international attention grew stronger in the 90s and the Istanbul Biennales offered venues of presentation and publicity to the more progressive contemporary art of Turkey, awareness of the value of this art and its development was promoted locally. The recent generation of Turkish artists profited from these changes both thematically and professionally.

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One of the internationally renowned Turkish artists of the post-2000 generation is Ahmet Ögüt. The past twelve months of the 27-year-old artist, who lives and works in Istanbul and Amsterdam, have been densely packed: his work has been featured in group exhibitions in San Francisco, Berlin, Sydney, Athens, Eindhoven, Seoul, Helsinki, Santa Fe, Nimes, Malmö, Stockholm, Zagreb, London, Banja Luka, and Stuttgart. In addition, he has had solo exhibitions in Basel and Barcelona, three Biennales, as well as numerous online and print contributions. more »

In the view from above, the earth appears as an unpopulated globe. Zoom in, and a view appears of regions and cities, houses and roadways, playgrounds and parks, cafes and stores, all populated by humans who appear tiny, like ants, occupied, engaged in a multiplicity of movements. The view from above relativizes the action. It strips the individual of particularity. and dissipates into the countless paths of the masses. Such an overview of the viewer is primarily based on this moment of his unobservedness, aloofness, and distance.

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What if, however, curiosity strikes? If the view creeps ever closer, for those who are interested in checking out life below in more detail? It involves the unavoidable risk of the voyeur: being caught in the act by a sudden, disturbingly inverted gaze. more »

Picture 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.

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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. more »

To put surfaces into the spatial. To construct three-dimensionality which we in turn flatten under our gaze. The transference of the spatial into the visual and vice versa - which opens up possibilities of the sculptural - is what fascinates the artist Markus Wilfling.

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For him, it is the conditioned perspective on everyday things which challenge him artistically. With his work, he shakes up our usual perceptions, which are geared towards normalization and from which we habitually expect nothing - for example, in our routines, the daily first morning glimpse into the mirror, the established routes which we follow each day, the handling of objects which we use on a daily basis. more »

To flare up, to freak out, to lose it—to see red. Red stands for danger, the red stoplight, red stands for pain and suffering, the red flag, red stands for love and desire, glowing-hot red, blood red. “The Eye” sees red. Exclusively. At least according to the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn, whose installation “The Eye” currently takes place at the Wiener Secession.

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Thomas Hirschhorn is a fan of philosophy. He admires Foucault. In one of his early works, Foucault investigates “The Order of Things”, which gives us a clear view of the world, putting some things together according to a relation, while others are incomparably set apart. The order of the things, according to the philosopher, is not self-evident, various possibilities exist. Foucault quotes from J.L. Borges’ book “The Book of Imaginary Beings”, an encyclopedia which arranges the world in a decidedly unexpected manner. more »

In 2007, he was the winner of the Cologne Art Award, one year later, he is nominated for the Strabag Art Award in Vienna. Bernhard Buhmann was born in 1979 in Vorarlberg. He is young and talented. His works are developed in his studio, and he is still studying under the direction of Johanna Kandl at the University for Applied Art.

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Artistically speaking, the painter is in an intermediary phase. When one’s own paintings have received such acknowledgments, there is the temptation to continue to reproduce that which has brought success. Although having financial security is certainly a relief, Buhmann has decided to move on to his next phase artistically. more »

One may think that there are not so many sculptresses. The fact is, they have always been around—they were already participating in cathedral workshops of the Middle Ages, however, often anonymously.

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The sculptress, Ulrike Truger, has always positioned herself in the public with her art, in fact, she has often placed herself “in the way”. The difficulty under which the form of a stone is wrought, finds its counterpart in its stability. Tackling the obstinacy of the stone is not only work, it is also a gift, because when a sculptress creates her art, it can then not be so easily removed—neither out of the way nor out of the memory as well. more »