Anzinger, Certa

SIEGFRIED ANZINGER locates his through green valleys and blue mountain range trekking figures in orientalistic atmosphere. Symbols for occident and orient confound with figures of christian and mythological iconography: apes and angels, cherubs and infants are on a journey with a parental couple in sated veils, lucent turbans and vestments. Based on the iconic tradition of the escape to Egypt, the itinerant family becomes a symbol for the politically charged topic of migration. Here their identity recedes behind veils, drawn with strong strokes. The veil acts as an ambivalent medium of attraction and covering, where only female eyes sparkle through. The proud but unrecognizeable mother figure sits once enthroned on a deep blue mountain, once on a horse. Anzinger´s male figures meanwhile show themselves unconcealed in their body shapes and facial features, but on closer inspection they fade away into the backround or dissolve to rough outlines. The family members are the observed on their journey, but as repellent back figures they do not divulge more than their silhouettes. Their colors melt away, merge into streaks of ambiguity. The eluding figures excite speculations of the observer, provoke an unconcealed imagination of the unknown.

In his oil works, AMADEUS CERTA raises the castle to a place of magic attraction, to a metaphor of love and rescue. On a white shimmering trackway, the castle lures the view of the observer through the blackness of the night, through a dark zone between spatial void and cosmic imagination. The fortress promises to be a place of refuge, shelter, secureness and silence for the observer. Nevertheless what is waiting behind the thick walls and jagged battlements, which quiet promise it means for the aspiring one, it is unknown – and also, which expected secret the view trails behind its walls through fore-and backround, surface and depth of the drawing. Certa scenes seem to be dream pictures of a tightly embracing couple, with the castle as a metaphor over their heads. White and black unicorns run or fly on their way to the fortress. The mythical figures are spatially ambivalent like the couple, bounded to fore- and backround through firm and fast outlines. The almost childlike line turns Certas drawings to entirely pristine pictures of yearning and loving. Repeatedly the figure and term of the savior appears, whose broad drawn silhouette, based on knightly ideals and virtues, breaks through scenarios of glaring explosions, wild scraps of conversation and unclear doodles, to bring the woman home safe and unscathed.

An exhibition with new paintings of Siegfried Anzinger and Amadeus Certa. We cordially invite to the opening at Friday, May 25, 2018.

SIEGFRIED ANZINGER, b. 1953 in Weyer an der Enns, Austria, co-founder of the young wild ones, looks back on severe national and international exhibitions. His works are collected by major museums as MoMA. Anzinger is laureate of the Oskar-Kokoschka-Prize, and was honoured with the Grand Austrian State Prize. Since 1997 he holds a professorship for painting and graphics at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

AMADEUS CERTA, b. 1992 in Mannheim, Germany, has graduated his studies of painting and graphics at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2016 as a Meisterschüler of Siegfried Anzinger with distinction. For his final degree presentation, Certa was awarded with the graduate price of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.