Klaus Wanker Klaus Wanker

KLAUS WANKER

Wanker's images come from the world of fashion and lifestyle magazines. The paintings show perfectly styled people, whose mediatized and stylized images present the glamorous world of the beautiful and the rich, a world shaped by the madness of youth and radical commercialization. The portraits of the teenagers, who are declared to be stars in the pictures, are striking and larger than life. The focus is on their faces, in which the dreams and longings of a Jeunesse Dorèe are reflected. Models are placed in front of urban backgrounds; High-rise facades, subway stations and desolate landscapes are scenarios in front of which they pose for the viewer. The images are also overlaid with barely legible slogans, which cover the images with messages that refer to a longing for feelings and emotional emptiness. In a world of flood of images, the greatest desire is to be perceived and seen.

Textauszu, Sabine Himmelsbach, Edith Ruß House for Media Art, Oldenburg

Wanker's artistic strategy of exposing a dead commercial industry and its manipulative influence on youth culture works: in their cool, austere beauty, the models are by no means happy, but strangely vulnerable. Wanker uses advertising and fashion photography as a substitute, as the only halfway legitimate playground of beauty banned from high art. ”Long painting on fast pictures. In clear contrast to the short-lived subjects of the advertising world, which Wanker uses through fashion magazines, is his elaborate and comparatively lengthy painting style, predominantly in oil on canvas .... Although Wanker's pictorial compositions are dominated by models, fashion and the fashion world, plays under The smooth surface but also an aspect of manipulation through comparable images of the real world of goods plays a role that promises the addressed target groups participation through hyper-real advertising subjects. In series of images such as Here we go again (2005), he places a film still of a car chase from Bullitt (1968), with the desiderata Ford Mustang GT-390 and Dodge Charger R / T, in a staged environment of androgynous relationship clichés, skateboarders and the omnipresent dress codes and thus suggests a plot of a new story that the viewer inevitably suspects. In fact, however, Wanker undertakes a further manipulation of found images, whose fictitious source material he now rearranges or assembles in the role of the author. While early pictures were not titled, in new works he brings format-filling text into the picture, which is difficult to grasp at first glance because it hardly contrasts the color palette. These texts are based on slogans and are associated with methods of indirect advertising such as product placement in Hollywood productions. The
At the same time, however, texts are also image titles that counteract this manipulation and thereby demonstrate it. Wenceslaus Mraek

Klaus Wanker stages young people in their street wear and their style: colorful, cool, precise. The models from the street are staged, so to speak posed. It is the world of the show, the scenery, the imaginary stardom. Snapshots of the moment. Fame and illusion are close together. Brainwashing through corporate branding, advertising and marketing, media and music channels. Products and the human product - created by managers and art directors. Kolja Kramer

The protagonists have no names. Individuals disappear behind the images of a lifestyle industry and the cool superficiality, the smooth and inexperienced arrangements of the shoots for glossy magazines. In describing these imagery, one cannot avoid using the terminology of the world of goods and fashion, in which names are replaced by brands and branding is the first commandment against pseudo-real backgrounds and
Interrelationships of the advertising subjects. Staged model worlds in which anonymous and interchangeable models pretend to be part of the same, although they consistently fill an image space without participation and present the attached accessories solely through gestures and facial expressions, just pose, in order to keep a phenomenon alive that was until recently Zeitgeist is the theme of the 1969 born Grazer Klaus Wanker, worked on in variations.
In 2005, curator Peter H. Forster wrote on the occasion of an exhibition at the Adler gallery in Frankfurt

KLAUS WANKER

1969 born in Graz
1996 studied painting and graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna
1997 Foreign scholarship with Prof. S. Anzinger at the Art Academy, Düsseldorf
1998 studies with Prof. Sue Williams
1999-00 studies with Prof. Adi Rosenblum
2000 diploma at the art academy
Lives and works in Graz

Exhibitions (selection)

2008    
Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica

2007   
Faked neon-exposed heroes; Galerie Adler, New York    
Illusion unlimited; Galerie Adler, Frankfurt

2007   
Rewindfast-forward; Kunsthaus L6, Freiburg (Gruppenaust.)

2006
Coolness forever; Junge Kunst e.V., Wolfsburg
Believe in me; Galerie Steinek, Wien
ZEITHEIST; Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica (Gruppenaust.)
Kunstlicht; Sara Tecchia Gallery, Rom, NewYork (Gruppenaust.)
Coolhunters; Budapest Mücsarnok, Kunsthalle (Gruppenaust.)

2005   
Here we go again; Galerie Adler, Frankfurt
Figur und Wirklichkeit; Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck
Kunstforum (Gruppenaust.)
Coolhunters; Künstlerhaus Wien u. ZKM Karlsruhe (Gruppenaust.)

2004   
Spektrum Kunstlandschaft; Hessische Landesvertretung, Berlin,(Gruppenaust.)

2003   
Sotheby´s; Wien (Gruppenaust.)

2001  
Bang-bang; Joanneum, Steirischer Herbst Graz
Auswahl Ankäufe; Neue Galerie, Graz (Gruppenaust.)
body fluids; station 3, Wien (Gruppenaust.)

www.galerieadler.com
www.markmorregallery.com
www.galerie.steinek.at