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2000
oil on wood
28 paintings
190 x 122 cm each
Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, AT
The solo exhibition at Galerie Krinzinger featured the first large-scale spatial installation integrating individual paintings. Two times fourteen paintings, in oil on wood panels, mounted in two rows each on a wood framework placed at a distance of 60 cm (2 ft) from the gallery’s walls, form two parallel walls of paintings, each 3.9 m (12.8 ft) tall and 8.54 m (28 ft) wide. The space between the walls is not so narrow as to create a corridor or tunnel, but it is too small (at a width of 4.5 m / 1.48 ft) for an unconstrained contemplation of the individual paintings. The spatial constellation in its entirety resists contemplative consideration and immersion in the pictorial illusion. The paintings themselves render their illusive character thematic on various levels. For the first time, the palette is reduced to shades of gray, a choice that has since been maintained, often in combination with an additional unmodulated color. An ensemble of ephemeral and phantom-like figures such as ghosts, soap bubbles, and semi-transparent protozoa populate this discolored space. At the same time, the pictorial illusion is explicitly intertwined with its support medium, the surface: the traces of the act of painting that, in part, consolidate into figures are also woven into networks and grids that keep the surface visible as the matrix of the pictorial appearance. The represented less-than-solid forms are intertwined with the factual semi-transparency of the layers of paint. The material facture is exhibited as the medium of optical illusion. The pictorial illusion is thus tied back to the processes of its production. The oscillation between the ephemeral optical illusion and the material solidity of the pictorial layer forces the beholder into a process of perception that is difficult to stabilize and that explicitly involves his or her own physical movement between the walls of paintings.