Work Archive
This page offers a chronological overview into my artistic work since 2006, when I started my studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
which makes your work personal […]."
“Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking”, 1993
David Bayles & Ted Orland
The “Time is Personal” drawings are a reflection of the individual vulnerabilities of the people in my immediate surroundings. By recreating photos (most taken by me) with pencils on paper, I let a reality come to life that is forever gone – and let myself feel time beyond time.
In 2020 I started a work series that reproduced digital glitch aesthetics in oil (on canvas) and pencil (on paper). After years of compositions featuring many individuals, I wanted to turn my focus onto one individual at a time, a practice deeply rooted in my passion for portraiture.
I started experimenting wih handmade pixelations in 2017, and kept the practice as part of my work process: to take a photo, sample its colors, and create visual abstractions with focus and dedication. During the lockdown, I continued processing personal and societal events and atmospheres, and started a series about the Black Lives Matter protests.
During the 2020 lockdown I created a series of oil-on-paper paintings. Paper sucks up the oil extremely quickly, resulting in an unusual workflow for oil painters: you work more in layers than in color blending.
In 2019 I started making photos and videos of anonymized people on public transport. This ultimately turned into a deeper curiosity, and maybe inquiry, on the topic of waiting. Any object or place can become one of longing, so I let this series become a space for a personal reflections on this.
2019: Short Films
In 2019 I expanded my image abstraction software (“Geometries Everywhere”) to be able to process video data. As a result, I created various short films.
2018: Kindness of Strangers
I produced these works after I finished my second series of psychotherapy sessions. The pieces have the wide-ranging, meandering ambiguities known from my previous work — which are also uniquely known to those trying to interpret dreams, Freudian slips or other co-conscious actions.
2017: Political Paintings
I started feeling limited and frustrated by mostly focusing on my emotional and sociological background as bases of my works — although my everyday reality is so strongly based on reflecting the various conditions of the world. As a result, I created a series of works depicting heavy political and societal events.
2016: Hopes and Expectations
This series consisted of works showing people in union, yet apart. Theatrical scenes populated with interpersonal agendas, focusing on a loose triple dynamic of identities, places and actions – with uncertainty being their potentially distinctive, uniting feature.
2014-2015: Large-scale Abundance
In 2014-2015 I created a lot of large-scale paintings that blended the ideas of abundance with those of minimalism — resulting in brimming, fuller pieces. I experimented with the idea and point-of-view of the theater stage: to offer a clear, direct angle into whatever ambiguity the paintings contain.
2013: Narrative Abundance
In 2012/213, after producing visually monolithic works, I started focusing on paintings containing an abundance of visual/compositional elements, to create various strands of meaning that would ultimately non-compete for attention.
2013: Prism
I created these works during a residency in Seattle (organized by my dear friend Siolo Thompson). The focus was on mass surveillance, as described in the then-recent whistleblowing efforts of Edward Snowden.
2013: Etchings
In 2013 the friendship with Patrick Wagner of Black Heart Press led to a two week effort in collaborative printmaking. This project was initiated by Patrick, and resulted in a series that mirrored and expanded on various formal ideas that I first established in my paintings.
2011-2014: Narrative Minimalism
In 2011 I started experimenting with large-scale paintings that would mostly focus on one monolithic visuality. The idea was to use various inherent aspecgts of painting to create platforms of meaning and potential – binding atmospheres. Narrative minimalism.
2010: Time-based Works
In 2010 I produced a series of drawings and paintings that focussed on creating static images out of time-based activities. The idea was to take an aspect of film (dynamic content), and recreate part of its potential in a different medium (painting and drawing).
2009-2010: Narrative Paintings
I solidified my initial stylistic choices in regards to narrative painting and drawing in 2009-2010, when still studying at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. How to narrate a person or situation visually? How do symbols, geometries and figuration interact?
2008: Narrative Paintings
I can trace a direct line of formal and emotional continuity between Dissection: Hope (2008), to the newest works that I create today. This includes the evolution of visual composition, color choice, use of geometry, the specific feeling of the depicted people’s gaze, etc.
2007: Tree of Knowledge
This work series consists of nine ink drawings, that together form a stylization of a tree (the upside-down pyramid). Each image depicts a ginseng root, and most of them also feature a specific face of a person that my life revolves around.
2006: Vertigo
2006 was the year that got me accepted into studying Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. I had been drawing for two years, and now experimented a lot with figuration and movement — sometimes bringing the two together.