Represented Artists at Galerie Kandlhofer

 

Karner positions his work between the disciplines of visual arts, performance and dance theatre. Within his practice, Karner continuously discusses bodily perception and the concept of corporeality itself. These are not only related to the human body, but can yet be understood as a wide discussion of object, materiality and space. In the artist´s installations and art environments, viewers frequently become players. Such participative impulses accentuate the irony inherent in these artworks. 

 

The repetition of recurring motifs references the serial production of industrial objects. In Karner‘s work, these motifs are hand-made pieces of cast iron that become part of the artistic process. His preferred motifs are beaked creatures and dogs or hares, often clad with bronze or gold. It would almost seem that these inanimate fantastic creatures are brought to life by the protagonists. With their interactive potential, the environments created by Karner generate various forms of display that are composed similar to arrangements of theatre props and are complemented by a series of performative gestures. 

 

Maximilian Prüfer’s practice predominantly involves the exploration of natural processes and their transference to the visual image. Within this, Prüfer examines a range of existential, philosophical and political subjects in relation to evolution, humanity’s manipulation of and ultimate interdependence with the natural ecosystem, contravening the human cultural paradigm of separation from natural phenomena. One element of Prüfer’s practice where the expression of this analysis is salient lies within his unique representation technique recording the movements and conduct of insects that he has denominated Naturantypie.

 

Through this methodological process, the very fine coating of the paper is displaced by the movement, creating an aesthetic that widens the concept of drawing independent of traditional tools. These works depict the most fundamental and instinctual forms of behaviour, including the impulse to survive and the economical employment of energy. However, this instinctual process is simultaneously manipulated by the artist by way of additional interpositions using barriers, scent, bait and light sources appropriate to the stimulus of each insect to manipulate the traces they leave behind. The works thus encapsulate an evolutionary process which continues and adapts despite the interference of humanity.

Nana Mandl (b. 1991 in Graz, Austria) studied at the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee and received her diploma in fine arts at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna.

 

Mandl creates expansive, colourful and material-intensive collages, composed of analog and digital image archives that she combines into precise and multi-layered images in which private memories meet the collective memory of a generation. In her practice, Mandl uses sticker motifs and decals, Disney characters and Bravo covers, handwriting and photos in conjunction with photoshop layouts and renderings, pixelated surfaces and visual information remains from digital image production, storage and reproduction. The canvas is repeatedly emphasized in terms of its materiality, different textiles meet and are processed in different ways and used embroidery as if a gestural brushstroke. In the work, sewn and embroidered items are an anchor point and antipole to the accelerated image production and circulation that characterizes digital technologies.

Alicia Viebrock (b. 1986, Munich, Germany) studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Professor Herbert Brandl and lives and works in Vienna, Austria. 

 

In Viebrock’s work exuberant colour formations meet reduced compositional constructs with calligraphic elements. Colour power and dominance meet purposefully placed painterly gestures. Fleeting structures interlock through the viscosity of the paint, condition each other as flowing colour fields or assert themselves in self-confident demarcation. The sensuality of the paintings is reflected in their immediacy. The display of poured, dripped and splattered paint are indications of the expressive range of the artist, adopting a highly physical and psychological relationship with the surface. While strong colour fields on the canvas evoke a deliberate imbalance, the gestural settings on linen find a more determined hold, which is broken by gentle painterly expressions. The latter provokes a delicate flickering in the pictorial space.

Hannah Perry (b.1984, Chester, England) lives and works in London. Perry received her BA in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths College, University of London and her MA from The Royal Academy of Art, London.

 

Hannah is a British artist working mainly in installation, sculpture, print and video. Continuously generating and manipulating materials (footage, sound clips, images and objects) Perry develops a sprawling network of references, carefully exploring personal memory in today’s hyper- technological society whilst bending back the systems of representation via hyperactive distribution. Perry is guided by music or speech, repetition, focalisation and deceleration, revealing the strength of our personal investment in images of the illusory (youth, power, sex, taste, lifestyle) as well as the prescriptive nature of these desires.

Richie Culver (b.1979, Hull, UK) is a British multidisciplinary artist focusing mainly on Painting, Photography and Sound work. He studied painting in the MA programme at the Royal College of Art, graduating in 2023.

Born in Hull in the North of England, Culver  left school with no qualifications to work in a factory making caravans. His practice encompasses diverse elements that range from painting, sculpture and photography to digital performance. Within this, Culver’s work is largely biographical wrestling with aspects of contemporary masculinity, the class system and the digital lens through which we live our lives.

 

A large proportion of Culver’s practice lies in his antagonistic relationship with technology, the ultimate impermanence of social media and the effects upon human interaction and linguistics, alongside personal and cultural memory. In this regard, much of the material for Culver’s works are formed from images collected on his phone including mundane mobile photography, google translate and notes apps screenshots containing excerpts of conversations, phrases and information. These screenshots are then blown up and printed on canvas, ultimately forming a visual record of an inner monologue that is fractured and at times disconnected. For example, short phrases translated into different languages and obscured by overpainting creates a visual metaphor for the quick ease at which these digital innovations create a superficial human connection that is ultimately alienated from true apperception.

Alina Kunitsyna (b.1981 in Minsk, Belarus) lives and works in Vienna and Damtschach, Austria. She studied at Lycee of Art, Minsk and the University of Art and Design, Linz, graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna in 2007. 

 

During her time in Minsk, Kunitsyna studied the still lives of the Renaissance period, both the theoretical and practical extensively. These artworks contained precious objects like orthodox garments, ancient decanters or featured vanitas motifs. The imitation of this époque made an experience that laid the foundation for her practice. Today Kunitsyna seeks inspiration in current pop culture, everyday life and art history combining these elements in the context of capricious jokes and allegories that capture the bewilderment of contemporary life.

Rodrigo Valenzuela (b.1982, Santiago, Chile) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Valenzuela completed an art history degree at the University of Chile (2004), then worked in construction while making art over his first decade in the United States. He holds a BA in Philosophy from Evergreen State College and an MFA at University of Washington (2012). He is a Professor of Art at University of California Los Angeles.

 

Using staged scenes and digital interventions, Valenzuela's photography, video and installation work is rooted in the contradictory traditions of documentary and fiction, at the same time, these pursuits are equally centered on a semiotic, politically engaged post-capitalist critique of social constructs and civic institutions.

 

Rodrigo Valenzuela’s photographic assemblages are often evocative of the kind of transitional spaces in modern living associated with building construction, urban decline and civil disobedience. These built environments, already a simulacrum of reality, are further complicated by his technique of using his own photographic work as backdrops against which additional installations are seamlessly built and rephotographed. In this way a complex sense of spatial displacement is created. Taken as a whole his work makes poetic use of the liminal spaces that modern living so often places us within, locations that are always on the threshold of being built or sliding into decline. Valenzuela speaks of travelling across the US by car and paying witness to the parts of the landcape that we look away from, the discarded parts of the American Dream that line the roadside mile after mile.

 

Just before completing his training at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt in Vienna with a diploma (1953-1958), Nitsch takes a position as a commercial artist at the city’s technical museum in 1957. Privately Nitsch focuses his artistic interest initially on Expressionism, which he links to mostly religious figurative scenes. Beginning in 1960, following a period in which Nitsch had turned more towards literature, he returned to painting, creating works in the Arte Informel style. It is in this year that the first painting actions take place, and already they are seeking to realize the idea of the Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries. Revolving around the intensive sensory experience of various substances and fluids, these actions become increasingly provocative in the coming years. Following screaming and noise action performances, conceived as abreaction plays, Nitsch undertakes the dismemberment of lambs, which lead to further actions involving flesh. After the Theatre proves a resounding success in the US and Germany at the end of the 1960s, Nitsch performs numerous actions throughout the 1970s in cities across Europe and North America.

Sofia Borges (b.1984 in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil) lives and works between São Paulo and Paris. Borges graduated in Visual Arts from the Universidade de São Paulo in 2008. 

 

For over a decade Sofia Borges has been using the photographic medium to study philosophical notions and to question the mere act of representation itself. Her extensive field of research started at paleontology museums, caves and other spontaneous shrines of archetype archiving that more recently has evolved into a practice oscillating between performance, collage, image and metaphysics. Disconcertingly unfamiliar and unrelated objects are unified through her strong aesthetic language and subsequently further intertwined to the body of her work, always in a seemingly intrinsic manner.

Exploring the nuances of reality and its malleability in our post-factual era, Marc Henry delves into the realm of digital image manipulation with a profound curiosity. A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna under the mentorship of Daniel Richter, Henry‘s multidisciplinary background includes degrees in economics and curatorial studies. This multi-faceted academic foundation underscores his thematic engagement with societal dynamics, macroeconomics, and politics, reflecting an expansive approach to the pictorial space.

 

Henry‘s artistic language is shaped by a keen interest in narration and composition, fueled by a iconography drawn from his personal archive of reference collages, AI-powered image generators, and 3D rendering programs. Engaging in a dynamic dialogue between the digital and analog realms, the artist often revisits the digital file after initial canvas exploration. Through an iterative process, he modifies colors, adjusts compositions, and incorporates newfound discoveries from the painting back into the digital realm. This rhythmic reciprocity continues until a distinctive form emerges, resembling a pseudo-narrative infused with memories of a fabricated reality.

 

Acaye Kerunen is a multidisciplinary performance and installation artist, storyteller, writer, poet actress and activist based in Kampala, Uganda. She graduated with a BSc in Mass Communication from the Islamic University in Uganda, Kampala and obtained a Diploma in Information Systems Management from Aptech. Kerunen’s installations are forged from natural materials locally grown, harvested, dyed, and woven in Uganda, including banana fibre, raffia, reeds, and palm leaves. Through her work, she seeks to dismantle the hierarchies of fine art and craft, elevating women’s labour within socio-political systems. She often commissions local women to create baskets, tablemats, winnowing trays, and other functional items before reimagining them as assemblage installations. Materiality is central to Kerunen’s artistic practice, and her mutable, expansive installations can be understood as living artworks. Through her intuitive use of material, colour, and form, the artist creates enthralling biomorphic abstractions that envelop viewers into their folds. 

 

Kerunen’s installations are deeply engaged with their environments, at once rooted in history and emancipatory in their resistance to colonialist, patriarchal narratives. Constructed using embroidery, hand stitching, knotting, and weaving techniques she learned from her mother, Kerunen’s artworks embody ancestral knowledge. The labours, songs, and identities of the women in her community reverberate through the fibres of the artist’s finished works. 

Faye Wei Wei (b.1994 in London, UK) graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in London, UK (BA Hons) in 2016. Wei Wei conceives of the painting process as an intimate choreography between actual and pictorial space. Often revolving around spiritual iconography and classical myth,love rituals and the theatricality of gender, her works sometimes suggest the themes of particular mythic narratives, and at other moments seem to depart into a more ambiguous, interior space of incongruity and uncertainty. With a palette of earthy greens, reds, pale pinks and blues, Wei Wei‘s quixotic paintings are inhabited by magical, folkloric images of bells, crosses, horses, snakes, swans, sea urchins and dreamy heart-faced figures allowing the viewer to feel like you’re getting lost in the artist’s imagination.

 

Just as her works are packed with motifs, so is her studio overflowing with trinkets, handwritten poetry, polaroids, soft toys, paper fans, ceramic pots and books. ‚I‘m surrounded by objects that are charged with emotional intensity things I‘ve collected on my travels or that people have given me,‘ she says. Alongside these objects, a further pillar of the holistic world of inspiration Wei Wei immerses herself in is French folk art, short stories by DH Lawrence, illustrated tracts on medieval flowers and volumes of Salvador Dali, Cy Twombly and Rubens.

 

Imbued with an indelible vibrancy and depth, Harminder Judge makes transportive sculptural works that simultaneously reference Indian neo-tantric painting, as well as the abstract expressionist and colourfield movements of the 20th century. His alchemical process involves layering pigments into pools of wet plaster followed by prolonged periods of excavation; sanding, polishing and oiling. Culminating in expansive modular panels, and ineffable shapes which seem to hover off the wall, colour, forms, and compositions are allowed to reveal themselves and intensify over time. 

 

This all results in a gleaming, vibrating surface where monolithic forms, seething horizons, and emanations of colour rise up from the solid granite-like depth beneath. The interplay between the granular and cosmic playout here and there is a real sense of a material phenomenon taking place, the remnants of which appear both crystallised and in a state of flux. The works as such exist in the present moment; Harminder has referred to them not as paintings but portals that offer us a wide plane to look through, allowing for broader contemplation to take place.

Born Allen-Golder Mullin Carpenter, 1999 in Washington DC, is a gender non-conforming interdisciplinary artist, designer, poet, author and activist. Their work as an artist serves to reconcile the various aspects of their identity as they relate themselves and the world around them.

 

Selected solo exhibitions include To Dream of Smoke, No Gallery, New York City, NY (forthcoming, 2024); Water Memory, Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna, Austria (2023); Ghetto Body Surrogate / My Body My Song, Screw Gallery, Leeds, UK (2022); Afotèz: Paper, Cotton, Stone./ SAMSARA , von Ammon CO, Washington D.C. (2022)

 

Selected group exhibitions and projects include Armory Off-SIte at the US Open, No Gallery, USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, Flushing NY (forthcoming, 2023); NADA New York, No Gallery, New York, NY (2023); FOCUS GROUP 4, von Ammon Co, Washington D.C. (2023);Dwelling, White Columns (Online), New York, NY (2023); Pedagogy As Self, HOUSING, New York, NY(2023); 20/92, Icebox Project Space, Philadelphia, PA (2023); Before Black Had A Name, Shungu Gallery, Frederick, MD (2021); Unveiling Resistance, Galleries at CCBC Essex, Baltimore, MD (2021); February Install, Dupont Underground, Washington D.C. (2021)

Frauke Dannert (b.1979 in Herdecke, Germany) lives and works at Cologne. Dannert studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and at Goldsmiths College in London. 

 

The genesis of Dannert’s practice lies in her interest in the architectural space and the medium of collage. These collages manifest themselves on paper, wall paintings, carpet inlays, curtains, projections, films and photographs. Through this she dissects architecture, examining it as to its sculptural potential, pointedly heightening particular features or else subverting preconceived structural assumptions. By altering the scale and shapes of the building materials depicted, Dannert produces creations that oscillate between the organic and the architectonic, illusion and reality.

 

Within her collage practice Dannert creates the initial compositions and then replicates them using a photocopier. The loss in the clarity and other nuances created by this process consciously transforms the original image. By reducing the photocopies to black, white and grey tones she distances the works from the original material reality. After duplication, Dannert further determines the shapes and thus the greater degree of alienation of the original motifs. She continues these optical illusions in her installations by overlaying the existing architecture with photographic architectural fragments, thus alienating spaces and the viewers experience of the space.