2010 - CHRISTOPH SCHIRMER

»ALLGEMEINANÄSTHESIE«

Wallinstallation "Allgemeinanästhesie (brown canoe)" Acrylic, varnish, ink on canvas & board, 170 x 228 cm, 2009
 

Private View:  Thursday  21. january  2010, 7.30 p.m.
Duration:   22. 01.  till  26. 02.   2010

Christoph Schirmer: Painterly-Virtual Metamorphoses

 Christoph Schirmer switches between the currently available new media and the traditional panel painting.
He lends the picture a painterly character by allowing the colour to work on its own. It serves not only the illusion of figure and space, but is both material substance on the picture surface and colouristic attraction. Sometimes the painter intensifies the haptics by creating zones like a relief. They function like applied tools in the futuristic, space-age design. The composed picture areas also evoke a space-age vision, noticeably different from conventional and homogeneous spatial renderings such as landscapes or interiors. Schirmer slurs several picture layers into one another, twists axes, fans out shortened perspectives and oblique lines into the picture plane – producing a spatial kaleidoscope. Like a picture puzzle, the individual picture levels move forward and back. A clearly differentiated figure-ground relationship is put aside in favour of a complex camouflage. Added to this is the moment of contemporaneity. Instead of a conventional "impressionistic" reproduction of a moment, of a situation, a scintillating sample.

by Florian Steininger, Curator BA-CA Kunstforum, Vienna, 2007.
translated by Abigail Prohaska, Berlin, 2007.