Kunsthaus (Art House)
Kunsthaus is an exhibition of works on paper by three Austrian artists – Peter Eder, Ottilie Grossmayer and Sylvia Vorwagner. The exhibit was curated by Heidi Zednik, an artist/curator who lives both in the US and Austria. This traveling exhibit was on view at Semi-Public Gallery in Asheville, NC last year. The exhibition is on view at Abecedarian Gallery February 17 – April 7, 2012.
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The work of these three artists emphasize gestural vibrancy and visual spontaneity. In addition, all three artists live and work in Gmunden on Lake Traunsee. While the full range of the artists’ individual work varies – in style, subject matter and medium – the work selected for this show is all mixed media on paper.
About the artists:
Peter Eder’s Aunt Emmy is the culmination of a year-long graphic response to a family photo album inherited from his aunt. Individual pages have been painted over, photographs altered or removed, the aunt’s handwritten notes either left visible or added to. Through this process, Peter attempted to re-establish a connection to a person he used to know well and also to artistically explore places, memories and emotions not his own.
Ottilie Grossmayer’s screen prints can be viewed as a study of two themes – poetry and word-play. Selected excerpts from T.S. Eliot’s four quartets- little gidding and Hannes Vyoral’s aus der Wildnis are graphically presented in a square format. The second theme, which Ottilie has focused on for several years, is the visual play on words, either through their double meaning or the tension between image and printed text. The screen prints are all hand-altered with paint or with handwritten or stenciled text.
Sylvia Vorwagner’s work can be seen as three thematic explorations: Connected Appreciation, Change your Attitude and an “open” series that examines reoccurring themes and symbols. Connected Appreciation, as the title series suggests, considers our human and specifically earth bound inter-connectedness and serves as a call for us to re-value our approach to the world around us. In Change your Attitude, Sylvia probes events that occur on the same day but in different locations – with some locations being specific, such as Tokyo, and others being abstractly referred to, such as The Day Before Yesterday. In each location, Sylvia references how human greed and power have destroyed the world we live in.
About curator Heidi Zednik:
Heidi Zednik is dual-citizen of Austria and the USA with an ongoing interest in cross-continent exhibition exchange. Such exhibitions have been arranged through projects such as Spondere, MAP (Mobile Art Project) and Suitcase Gallery. Her visual artworks have been exhibited and collected internationally. She is represented by Abecedarian Gallery, Denver, CO and affiliated with Semi-Public, Asheville, NC
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