Markus Proschek Markus Proschek

OPENING
Thursday, 23.10.2008, 6.30 pm

WELCOME
Christian Ebner, Corporate Communications STRABAG SE

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Nina Schedlmayer, Journalist and art critic

Markus Proschek, this year's main prize winner, impresses with monumental paintings that are characterized by a precise description. This mimetic moment, however, does not show itself in a direct translation of reality, but in an exciting arrangement of the picture motifs. Quotes from art history are inscribed in rooms that are reminiscent of fascist architecture, or vice versa: sculptures with the schematized features of the ideologized body are placed in current environments. Florian Steininger Bank Austria Art Forum

Markus Proschek questions these relics of our still suppressed “history of the senses”. He paints these motifs again using an elaborate glaze technique. But he is well aware of the danger of this evocation of the repressed. How easily this “follow-up” can end in an affirmation. The artist circumvents this by using the imagery of the “Role models” with quotations from hyper-realism and installation breaks. This break through a motivic collage shows the rift between program art and free design in a work structure. Markus Proschek thus makes an illuminating contribution to the question of the aesthetic structure of fascism. Boris Manner, curator, Vienna.

>Markus Proschek
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Photos: STRABAG ART