Jakob Gasteiger

Extract

20th May - 1st July 2023

Lisbon

Richeldis Fine Art and Encounter are pleased to present Jakob Gasteiger, Extract, opening on Friday 19th May 2023. The exhibition brings together an important collection of paintings created between 2015-2023. This selection of works are representative of the distinct visual language for which Gasteiger has become institutionally renowned. The show includes works taken from series recently exhibited in the artist’s retrospectives at The Albertina and Salzburg Museum, Austria.

Gasteiger predominately paints using a hand-cut cardboard comb to create his distinctive minimal abstract compositions. This unique approach to making was initially developed in the 1980’s as a radical counterpoint to the Expressionist tendencies prevalent in Austria’s contemporary painting scene at the time. Often working in series or bodies of works, Gasteiger’s enduring vision and process has been refined and consistently employed over the last four decades. The artist has been recognised internationally for his unique visual language and philosophy of making, which collapses boundaries between painting, architecture and sculpture. Different from other traditions of minimalism, that often carry symbolic suggestions or transcendental associations, the works that emerge from Gasteiger’s studio are self-referential in their unwavering exploration of purely formal concerns. Often monochromatic and exclusively produced with a specific production method, Gasteiger deliberately controls and limits the parameters by which a painting comes into being. As such, in his paintings there is a heightened emphasis on issues of scale, depth, composition, colour, material and texture. In this sense, the exhibition explores the thematics of extraction and repetition from multiple perspectives. Not only does the artist continuously drag paint away from his canvases, but he is also concerned with the obfuscation of wider visual reference, narrative and the symbolic. Gasteiger’s work is a process of production born out of reduction, a clarity of vision and process distilled to its elemental form. Gasteiger uses his comb as a tool to create distance and detachment between himself and the work, a conscious move away from expressive gesture. The artist often mixes glass, copper, iron or aluminium powder into his paint, a material occurrence that references his industrial processes of making whilst also questioning the fundamental properties of painting itself. In this manner the works sit on an unstable edge between painting and sculpture, spatial object and architecture. The works profound effect is in their material presence and rhythmic repetition. Their minimal strategies transform the way in which we read form and decipher the space around us.