Bajtala / Kempinger / Selichar

Miriam Bajtala, Herwig Kempinger, and the artist couple Loredana and Günther Selichar work with the classic artistic disciplines – drawing, painting, film – with photography playing a central role in their work. What they have in common is a media-reflective, analytical examination of the medium of photography, which, freed from all narrative elements, demands an autonomous image status.

In her 57-part image series “Works for Untitled,” Miriam Bajtala refers to the artistic strategy of labeling works of art “Untitled,” in which the visual language of the image is not concretized or narrowly guided by linguistic signs. The resulting “Works for Untitled” show the literal reversal of this expression. You can see the photographic image of the back of a frame on which the title is written. It is an expectant offer without visual fulfillment that can be placed in the viewer’s head or remains as a linguistic symbol. It describes a remainder that everyone negotiates for themselves.

Herwig Kempinger’s statement that photography “is closer to painting through the four sides and corners of the picture than our actual perception of the world” and “that one should never look at a work of art for the laborious work of its creation” has been in his from the beginning Work anchored as a distinctive artistic strategy.
In his multi-part work “Atem,” the title already suggests what is at stake in his attempt to explore the most direct evidence of human existence through photography. Not only does a person (the artist himself) become manifest through the process of photographic representation, but at the same time a proof (a trace of the actual) is created for the fidelity of photography in the sense of “straight photography”, but at the same time it mutates into one minimalist image.

Loredana and Günther Selichar examine the conditionality of technical media. In their second collaborative work (after the digital video work “GT Granturismo” from 2001), they are dealing with cameraless photography, the photogram, the archaic original form of the photographic image. In the spirit of the saying “Whatever weighs, it counts” they playfully classify a large range of different photo papers in terms of their format and weight. From the size of a writing sheet to wall-sized panel pictures, the unique works have one thing in common: the weights placed in the dark correspond exactly to the grammage of the photo paper actually processed. Photography in its simplest form, pushed to the limit in terms of craftsmanship and aesthetics, suddenly seems like concrete art that says no more than what is factual and can therefore perhaps unfold its greatest magical potential.