BAUKUNST GALERIE
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Oliver Dorfer dooze, 2007 acrylic on plastic 200 x 200 cm signed

The Baukunst Galerie opens on Friday, the 31st of August 2007 from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. a great solo-show with new paintings of the Austrian Oliver Dorfer. <recent recordings> is already the sixth solo-exhibition of this artist at the gallery. The curator and author Nadia Ismail will give a short introduction in his artistic œuvre.

Oliver Dorfer, born in Linz in 1963, is a painter, drawer, graphic- and object-artist and he is an autodidact. Parallel to his scholastics of Social Studies and Economics at the Johannes-Kepler-University of Linz he cut his own artistic path during regular working stays in Canada and by an intense exchange at artist symposia in Austria, Czech Republic, France and Italy. Moreover he affiliated himself with the artist groups “K5“ in 1989 and “MAERZ“ in 1990. Dorfer already won several national and international competitions. Besides the Promotion Award for Fine Arts by the City of Linz (1991) and the Bauholding Promotion Award for Fine Arts (1995), the artist received a Menton Spéciale du Jury at the Festival International de la Peinture in Cagnes-sur-Mer in 1994 and was awarded the Prize of the Federal Capital of Vienna at the 26th Austrian Graphic Art Competition in 1999. His works were already presented all over the world in different exhibitions, amongst others in Vienna, Warsaw, Paris, Rome, Athens and Toronto. In 2004 the Upper Austrian State Museum in Linz organized a large retrospective, which documented the formal and iconographic focal points of his œuvre’s history of the past twenty years.

Since 1980 one can notice a remarkable but homogeneous development in Oliver Dorfer’s works. Whereas his early works were characterized by dark shaded figures and an expressive flow, this massiness and expressivity is withdrawn in favour of transparent pastel tones and a rational construction of the image. The narrative and the figuration as a repetition of leitmotives (e.g. heads and torsos) and schematic outlines remain as constants.
That also applies to his current art works. Since 2004 he works them out in acrylic on plastic and for the first time this year also on an acrylic panel. An anew formal and technical compression of his image vocabulary has taken place, deliberately corresponding with new tendencies of contemporary painting. As in Hard Edge Painting and the works of Gary Hume all types of personal gesture are eliminated. The shapes are reduced and without any depth, the colors are pure, feather-edged distinguished from each other and covered with a glossy finish. The individual items of the image look like templates or foils, that are interleaved or superposed arranged and intersect each other. At this Oliver Dorfer plays with the competition of figure and ground, concreteness and abstract composition.

The title of the exhibition <recent recordings> refers to the production process of the paintings. The artist precedes in a kind of reverse sampling the mechanical painting process with an electronic mixing, though there is no value-distinction between found and invented items. He resorts to a collection of different image resources, which are scanned, processed, divided and rearranged by the artist. His image concept is primarily an accumulative one. All kinds of sources are tapped. Thereby Dorfer mediates not only topically but also stylistically between Europe and Asia – a culture area he is very familiar with because of several travels and stays: elements of Anglo-American Pop Culture (as Pixar-movies and comic characters of Disney, Charles M. Schulz and Dick Bruna) and new cross-border artistic movements from Asia (as Hentai and Manga comics) inspire his imaging process. Parallels to other established artists are recognizable in the œuvre of Andy Warhol and Sigmar Polke, whose serigraphically orientated use of citations bears structural resemblance to Dorfer’s digital image transformation.

Figures, characters and punctuation marks are synthesized to logos, icons and pictograms and create a distinctive picture language, which evokes several ideas, but defies a direct readability. His art works invite us to image participation and subjective interpretation. They are characterized by the artist’s conviction, that every view alters a pictorial world. Thus Oliver Dorfer’s œuvre is located at the focal point of the complex cross-over of signs in our modern image-media-society. His pictures reveal that every graphical symbol is nothing else but the sum of its connotations.






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