Time Out
31 October – 11 November 2023
Private View: Wednesday 1 November, 6-9pm
Austrian artist Laura Stadtegger discovered her love of painting at an early age; she has been drawing since childhood and is particularly fascinated by the dynamics of the moving image, which she encountered in the form of animated films. Developed into her guiding principle, she takes up this dynamic and expresses it in many different themes on canvas. Her search for archetypal qualities includes themes such as Greek mythology, which she has laid out in large-scale painting series, stories from the Bible, philosophical reflections and an examination of the impressions she brings back from her various travels.
She studied in NYC and Vienna, and since a three-month stay in India, she has repeatedly dealt with the theme of water, which she knows how to express with her own formal language. Time Out actually means time out, water has changed its aggregate state and is represented in the form of ice cubes in drinks, cocktails. You can tell a lot from an ice cube, its energy-consuming production, it can be a symbol of transience and a still affordable consumer good, at the same time it stands for the primordial principle of the idea; from water we come; climate change is slowly thawing the permafrost and revealing countless treasures from the past. Above all, however, the ice cube is meant to cool us down, it makes us cool and visually enhances drinks, it is a game with superficiality and this is what Laura Stadtegger tries to portray in her utopian-looking series of pictures.
