Robert Muntean Robert Muntean

ROBERT MUNTEAN / WITHOUT A SOUND

The solo exhibition of the winner of the Strabag Art Award 2007, Robert Muntean, shows from October mainly new works created in his studio in Leipzig as well as older works that document the development of the artist from Styria.
Robert Muntean, born in Leoben in 1982, first studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna under 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" was the title of the work that was awarded at the Artaward 2007 ("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 reflect their spiritual content. The tradition of Austrian painting, if we think of Schiele or Gerstl, is continued here in unpretentious, expressive realism. Here the painting unfolds its abstract beauty, unobtrusive, almost casually, but quite haunting.

ROBERT MUNTEAN

1982 born in Leoben
2000-05 Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna with Prof. Hubert Schmalix
2005-06 University of Graphics and Book Art, Leipzig
2006 diploma
Lives and works in Leipzig

Robert Muntean's painting does not even attempt to compete with a picture reality in high resolution and sharpness or to take his motifs from the cool personage of the media backdrop that surrounds us.
In this way, the pose is opposed to the gesture, not the representation, the presentation (exhibition), but people who seem to completely cancel themselves out in their actions, they figure.
Authenticity and presence are not created by the hardness of gaudy surfaces and sensational color explosions, but rather by a kind of "softening" that creates the necessary distance, not distance.
Narrative, narrative moments do not arise ostensibly from linguistic, textual set pieces and references, but with the means of color, surface and structure.
Not a simulacrum, but an awareness that painting, understood quite democratically, is primarily color on a flat surface. So his painting process becomes more progressive,
Flow and volatility are determined instead of being lived out in technical perfection and quasi-realistic representations and surfaces.
Painting becomes a game, a pure means without an end. Therefore, for the situations he chose, in the sense of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, one could rather speak of "profane" moments instead of private ones. a new use available. Not the information but the gesture is what ultimately counts here.
Max Benkendorff, artist, Leipzig

Exhibitions (selection)

2007  
Art Austria 07; Galerie Gerersdorfer, Wien (Gruppenaust.)

2006 
Leipzig retour; Galerie Gerersdorfer, Wien Sub Rosa;
Diplomausstellung, Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Wien (Gruppenaust.)

2005  
Jetzt hier und morgen gestern, Artothek-Galerie, Wien S/W; Forum Stadtpark,
Graz (Gruppenaust., Kat.)

2004
Somewhere else; Steirischer Herbst, Minoriten-Galerie, Graz 
Are you famous under your skin?; Stadtgalerie Wolfsberg 
Take-away; Galerie Eugen Lendl, Graz (Gruppenaust.)

2003  
Kaiserschmarren; Black Dragon Society, Los Angeles (Gruppenaust.)
Sunday morning; Raum 8, Wien (Kat.)
Art Position 03; Ottakringer Brauerei, Wien (Gruppenaust., Kat.) 
Die Blaue Donau und das Schwarze Meer; Literaturmuseum Odessa 
(Gruppenaust.)

www.gerersdorfer.at

"Without a sound"

The more recent works by the painter Robert Munteans appear at first glance through a clear reduction in the elements used. These are figure, color and area. The figure and the background appear to be in the same spatial plane. This effect is created by a flowing brushstroke that connects figure and surface through its course. As a result, his figures do not emerge from the space surrounding them, but rather float, as it were, within the color surfaces surrounding them. The soft, flowing brushstroke and the texture resulting from this gesture develop spatial quality themselves. In this way, graphic elements flow into spatial structures. These structures arise from the painting process itself. The creation process of the pictures is characterized by a layer by layer overpainting and blurring of the surfaces, a succession of colors. The structure of an image develops in a targeted, continuous interplay between calculation and intuition, as well as an interplay and opposition of figurative and abstraction.

Robert Muntean's affinity to attitudes towards musical production is reflected in this form of the creative process. As he stated himself, music is often used as a formal yardstick for one's own painting process. The development of an image is therefore comparable to the structure of a piece of music in which the most subtle differences and shifts in intensity and volume are important, and noise, which has become content, takes on melodic qualities itself. Picturesque surfaces are then not made legible and tangible as visual quotations, but develop their effect from the direct color quality of perception: pure noises, mere colors.
"Without a sound" describes the core and starting point of tonal and differentiating structures: noise, noise, hissing. And at this zero point, so to speak in the eye of the typhoon, silence awaits us as an absence. Robert Muntean's painting takes place in this place. Max Benkendorff, artist from Leipzig

Robert Muntean constructs picturesque interiors with dynamic vectors such as beams, walls and roof gables, into which he integrates female figures from behind. Its soft, open brushstroke is characteristic, which gives the painting a velvety surface texture and a soft atmosphere. Florian Steininger
Curator Ba-Ca Kunstforum, Vienna

All works vibrate in a restrained, well-tempered ability that may express sometimes quiet restraint, sometimes noble fadesse or gently vibrating emptiness. But precisely because of their restrained coloring, these works have a captivating presence. This painting accepts itself and the silence resting in it and renounces stimulating distraction and becomes strong and convincing precisely because of this. Franz Schicho, catalog 2003