Erwin Bohatsch - What can painting do?
"What can painting do?" More than 40 years, Artist Erwin Bohatsch explores the possibilities of painting in his artistic work and doing so, he moved from figurative to abstract painting. Now his oeuvre is on display at Albertina Museum in Vienna.
In his beginnings, Erwin Bohatsch worked in Vienna’s Ethnological Museum, drawing African masks and other artefacts, the influence of which is noticeable in his early pictures. At first, Bohatsch was considered part of the Neue Wilde movement of the 1980ies, but the group Wirklichkeiten of the 1970ies had a certain influence on his work as well.
Since 2005, Bohatsch teaches abstract painting at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts. In his work he gradually abandoned figurative painting in favour of abstract floating, dripping shapes or even monochromic white pictures.
Unpretentiously, he uses basic material with a light touch, resulting from an unorthodox approach towards the images’ surface. His dense glazes, brushstrokes and layers display a wide range of surface textures. Behind the apparent simplicity of every single painting there is a process of meticulous manufacturing, that nevertheless leaves space for improvisation.
Subtle and suggestive, always oscillating between figuration and abstraction, his paintings present signs and shapes that trigger spatial and figurative associations, although never allowing for narrative descriptions.
Bohatsch deciphers the duality between the physical realm and painting with its intrinsic materiality, confronting it with the idea of a fleeting image, one that is eternally ephemeral.
However, it is of essential importance and of fundamental interest for him to contrast the specific characteristics and preconditions of painting to the perceptual field of the observer, always from a poetic point of view.
In spite of the absence of demonstrative gesturing, closer observation reveals that individual works as well as the totality of the exhibited works transmit an unexpected visual intensity. They contain a reflexion on the act of painting itself, and on its nature and principles, but they transcend the physical means of the genre in order to constitute themselves as something that is more than the sum of its parts. (written by Cem Angeli)
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