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 »

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 »

Art can be critical of media and media criticism can be fun—that’s the message anyway from “dream manufacturer” Götz Bury’s art. In his Traumfabrik (“dream factory”), the artist produces prototypical works from the image landscapes of the media world, whether they be turkey-serving presidents in combat gear as the protagonists of the “axis of evil”—with or without AK-47s, holidays under palm trees, documentations of Neanderthal life, or things happening otherwise elsewhere in the world.

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These props that are inspired by stereotypes of reality in the media are developed from sheet metal, pasteboard, and wood in the workshop of the artist and are reimagined by visitors to the Traumfabrik through extreme gestures and impersonations. These compositions of “reality images” are thereby experienced as the scurrility of exaggeration, thanks to the omnipresent one-dimensionality of media-presented reality itself. more »