Geometric Diversity

OPENING: Dienstag, 6. NOVEMBER mit DR. GERALD MATT

Modern art was not always in agreement, was often even polemically in dispute about the use of geometry for painting. Insightful drawings and representative paintings by Auguste Herbin (1882-1960) - known in France as the father of concrete art - by the pioneer of Op Art Victor Vasarely (1906-1997), and Bauhaus artist Herbert Bayer (1900-1985) are juxtaposed as genealogical Footnotes to various positions of Austrian abstract painting. The exhibition Geometric Diversity allows a look at the conceptual diversity behind the geometric reduction. While Hermann J. Painitz (1938-2018) follows Herbin's formal principles of symmetry and circular construction, Georg Salner (born 1958) builds on his concept of an alphabetic plastique in the context of contemporary computer languages. The pioneer Vasarely, who became known through the exhibition Le Mouvement in the 1950s, was interested not only in perception effects, but also in the dynamics and movement of forms. These interests are also realized through the ‚Autobinären Raumbilder‘ paintings and the so called ‚Sehmaschinen‘ by Alfons Schilling (1934-2013). The influence of the playful-animistic understanding of form to be observed in the work of Herbert Bayer is combined in the painting of the Austrian pioneer of geometric abstraction and constructivism Hildegard Joos (1909-2005) with elements of the OpArt, as Vasarely had developed, to a multilayered reflection on the possibilities of geometric means. A constant in the use of geometry for art is also its association with mathematics and thus the expression of restraint, exactness and order. Christian Hutzinger's (born 1966) contemporary formulation of this pictorial order of form and color completes the narrative of an exhibition that draws attention to the conceptual contrasts behind the formal affinities of the various positions.

FEATURED ARTISTS: Herbert Bayer, Auguste Herbin, Christian Hutzinger, Hildegard Joos, Hermann J. Painitz, GeorgSalner, Alfons Schilling, Victor Vasarely