“For years now Robert F. Hammerstiel has explored in his artistic work the way in which human beings yearn for happiness, a sense of safety and security, an idyll, and all the wishful projections they associate with that. Human beings create surrogate worlds as a means of withdrawing and retreating from the realisation of their limited existence, and the fact that they are trapped, with no hope of escape, in the Sisyphean cycle of life – not to mention their ever greater disorientation in a world perceived as all too inaccessible. In his works Robert F. Hammerstiel examines surrogates such as the private home. The auspicious-sounding titles of his series of works, such as All for Your Delight or Make Yourself at Home, feature an ironic twist. So ultimately, the perfectly and lovingly shaped paradise is nothing other than a backdrop, a wishful projection, and an illusion. But such is the perfidious nature of existence that without the succour of these “props”, we human beings remain helplessly at the mercy of our fear of the unknown.” (Petra Noll)

Robert F. Hammerstiel, *1957 in Pottschach, Austria. Lives and works in Vienna, Austria.