Broken Mirror

Three members of the younger generation of Austrian painters from Graz and Vienna, draw material for their work from their surroundings and what they see and experience. Fanta, Fliedl and Pippan react to the environment as if they were looking at themselves in a mirror. What is common to the paintings and drawings of all three is that they deal with a human figure that is fragile or in some way broken. This is how they actually look at their broken reflection, in terms of psychoanalysis you could say at their shadow, at a broken mirror. This especially applies to Pippan’s work, which continues the tradition of expressive Austrian painting in his own attempt to come to terms with his own world. The work of Michael Fanta interweaves a mixture of cinematic and oneiric. His paintings capture shots of intriguing frames in small formats, which place the viewer from the position of voyeur to the position of active participant. These representations take place through abstract stylizations of characters, random situations and captions. The resulting narratives thus raise the question of whether it is only the artist’s fantasy or the viewer’s projection. Fanta’s paintings reflect the image of the Viennese enfant terrible who likes to dig into the absurdities of everyday life with witty dissociations and distortions of reality. In his works, he shows views of various intimate and external encounters: from the comical Italian exclamation of pleasure, floating in space to the grotesque-comic positions of each of the sexual partners from two perspectives — one of which is blurred by sweat or movement. Fliedl paints the rooms of friends from the Viennese graffiti scene in order to evoke his surroundings through canvases and conversations with them. In the room where he paints for the graduation exam, he paints the very ceiling with his abstract shapes under the influence of graffiti aesthetics. In this way, the portraits in the space face the ceiling paintings.