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ART AWARD 2007

The award ceremony of the Strabag Art Award 2007 took place on May 24th 2007 in the Art Lounge in the Strabag House.

The winner of the Art Award 2007 is
> ROBERT MUNTEAN

The recognitions received:
> BERNARD AMMERER
> BIRGIT PLESCHBERGER
> KLAUS WANKER
> MONI K. HUBER

> Presse Artaward 2007
> Katalog Art Award 2007

The jury that met in March 2007 consisted of:

Prof. Dr. Wieland Schmied, art historian, Katalin Néray, director of the Ludwig Museum in Budapest; Florian Steininger, curator of the BA-CA Art Forum, Vienna; Mag. Edith Raidl, contemporary art expert; Barbara Baum and Wilhelm Weiss, Strabag Art Forum.

Strabag has been involved in contemporary art for over 15 years. Be it the collection with over 1300 works, be it the annual art promotion prize with the exhibitions in the Art Lounge or the Gironcoli-Kristall art and event hall located in the house.
Art crosses borders and creates transparency. The new slogan “building visions, building values ​​building Europe” will also come true in the field of art.
In 1994 the building holding company Strabag Art Prize was established in Spittal / Drau, and the related exhibitions were shown in the gallery in Klagenfurt. In 2005 the Strabag Art Award was moved to the Art Lounge in the Strabag House. The long list of nationally and internationally known prize winners proves that art prizes now more than ever play an important role in the promotion and success of many artists and are an incentive to examine and further develop one's own artistic work. The Art Award stands for consistency, for artistic maturity, for innovation, but above all for timeless quality that is not always age-related.

This year 340 Austrian artists applied, 70 of which were selected by the preliminary jury for the final round. All participants in the Art Award contributed with great commitment.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank our jury, the art historian Prof. Wieland Schmied, Katalin Neray, the director of the Ludwig Museum in Budapest - who also plays an important role in our Hungarian art award -, Edith Raidl, expert and Collector of young art as well as with Florian Steininger, curator of the BA -CA art forum in Vienna. 5 artists per year are selected by the jury and each receive a solo exhibition in the Art Lounge as well as purchases.
Our thanks also go to the gallery owners who do invaluable work for young artists and who have referred many good artists to us. We would be delighted if this symbiosis would work so well again next year.

Many of the works in the award-winning exhibition have a common theme: the young generation and their status in a society that is characterized by ephemerality and rapid growth. These works are dedicated to the phenomenon of beauty, but they also contain breaks and contradictions. The importance of the emotional and the unadjusted, the pushing against the limits, self-reflection are themes of expressive realism or realism determined by photography, which contrasts with images of atmospheric landscape and architectural painting.
Barbara Baum, Strabag Art Forum

With Birgit Pleschberger, the second youngest winner, we meet a colorful personality who works in a very versatile, flashy and unadjusted manner. After her studies at the Mozarteum, the Salzburg native worked in the fields of painting, printmaking and objects. She is known for her body-related self-portrayals in the sense of a funny, experimental and thoroughly self-deprecating actionism. Her large series of works, Mario-netten, charcoal on paper, shows people hanging by loose threads, sometimes in the subway with
Fitted with hinges, shrill and vulnerable at the same time. Existential fears and social criticism play a role here, anger and helplessness. A very intense, unmistakable imagery shows us extreme types and characters.

Klaus Wanker's relation to the fashion and advertising world is evident in his work. Born in Graz, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and later with Sue Williams and Adi Rosenblum at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf. In the globalized world of advertising, identity becomes image, an illusory world between superficiality and disorientation, between emotional emptiness and perfection emerges. The portrayed models and young people whose dream of being a star is shattered live in this illusory world. Klaus Wanker's perfect, picturesque works not only founded their success in the exhibitions in America, he knows the world of models from times when he worked as a model himself. The focus is on the face, sensitively and directly reproduced, often covered by a painterly veil. The presentation is underpinned by integrated messages, barely noticeable lettering in American slang, which put the perfect reality show in doubt.

Robert Muntean, born in Leoben in 1982, first studied at the academy with Hubert Schmalix, and later at the University of Graphics and Book Art in Leipzig. Today he lives and works in Leipzig, which has already replaced Berlin as the center of new art development. "Sub rosa" is the title of his award-winning work, roughly translated as "in confidential, in secret". The artist leads us into the quiet intimacy of the pictures, whose subtle painting shows us everyday scenes. People who are not represented by gestures and posture in the sense of a representative portrait, but rather reflect its emotional content. The tradition of Austrian painting - think of Schiele or Gerstl - is continued here in a pleasantly unpretentious realism. Here the painting unfolds its abstract beauty, unobtrusive, almost casually, but definitely haunting.

In addition to his law degree, the Viennese artist Bernard Ammerer always preferred painting. According to the motto that one should follow a vocation and given talent, he studied at the Angewandte with Prof. Herzig, later with Johanna Kandl and soon found his unmistakable style. It shows young people with a strong presence in the midst of urban fringe areas, sitting or moving in front of a white, sketched background. Abundance and emptiness create a successful contrast here. Ammerer asks us the question of orientation, pointing fingers, pointing arms, lines, young people, torn between haste and lethargy. You ask yourself: what are we waiting for? “A new place again” is one of his picture titles, which contain the hope for new perspectives in the midst of conflict and chaos.

Moni K. Huber comes from Salzburg, studied at the University of Applied Arts and lives in Vienna. Stays abroad such as in Chicago and Argentina as well as various projects have increased her interest in the subjects of home, landscape and tradition. Several series that contain a certain irony and absurdity, such as pools, American lofts and Austrian landscapes with and without staffage. Today we see three works from the series Japonism, painted from photos in the Sankeien Garden in Yokohama, where Moni K. Huber stayed for a long time last year. Tradition and artificiality, the architectural and the constructive, meet soft, romantic landscapes with a strong atmosphere.