Sebastian Doplbaur, Lukas Matuschek, Sebastian Scholz and Thomas Steineder do not form a formal group and this is the first time they are presenting their works in a group exhibition. Their paths began to intersect at Vienna's die Angewandte (University of Arts and Crafts), and later the three of them founded a shared studio, which currently hosts around ten sculptors, designers, photographers and painters.
Bubbles in Bubbles
Artist: Lukas Matuschek, Sebastian Doplbaur, Sebastian Scholz, Thomas Steineder
Curated by and text: Matej Frank
Studio G21, Olomouc
The reflections on the surface of the bubble distort the image and bend reality. As the bubble inflates and flies, descends and rises, and finally bursts with a pop, it captures our attention and keeps us in tension. A similar tension, a play with reality and a certain spectacularity in simplicity is common to the paintings, photographs and sculptures of the four artists from the shared Viennese studio on Kröllgasse. Each of the quartet forms a bubble within the studio, which in turn is a bubble within the Viennese art scene, which is a bubble in itself.
Sebastian Doplbaur, Lukas Matuschek, Sebastian Scholz and Thomas Steineder do not form a formal group and this is the first time they are presenting their works in a group exhibition. Their paths began to intersect at Vienna's die Angewandte (University of Arts and Crafts), and later the three of them founded a shared studio, which currently hosts around ten sculptors, designers, photographers and painters. A play with reality is characteristic for the selected four artists, they often quote pop culture symbols, play with a blurred vision of the world both metaphorically and literally. Their activities are intertwined and the attentive eye cannot miss the occasional influence of the authors on each other. The Olomouc exhibition was composed with a certain amount of humour, both in the selection and creation of new works and in relation to the gallery's fragmented space. The artists are not afraid to disrupt the usual arrangement of the gallery with slight interventions, whether it is the apparent invisibility of the exhibition, the emphasis on the complicated exhibition space, the use of atypical places or the quotation of architectural elements.
Sebastian Doplbaur moves away from his foundation as a painter, often working with admitted raw materials. He combines their character and apparent craftsmanship with a subversive sense of humour. This may not always be clear to all, but alongside the obscurity it is equally familiar.
Despite the fact that Lukas Matuschek's characteristic works are painting installations, he avoids working with oils, acrylics and brushes. In a multi-step process, he transfers inkjet prints from domestic printers of various brands onto canvases and sololite panels, creating a kind of collage of interpenetrating colour surfaces. The blurred fields often feature familiar objects and details of everyday situations as well as cutouts of landscapes or urban environments.
The softness of shapes, quotations from pop culture and domestic furnishings, and a certain dreamy playfulness of playgrounds are common to Sebastian Scholz's series of objects. Scholz combines well-known shapes and motifs in his paintings and sculptures - maquettes as well as puddings and other objects. However, he cleverly wraps them in an almost surrealistic veil of material and scale transformations.
By manipulating the film negative and experimenting with the photographic medium both in front of and away from the camera lens, Thomas Steineder engages in a dialogue with the origins of photographic creation, but responds in a sovereign contemporary language. Throughout the creative process, he uses coordinated chance to present us with multi-layered images that blur the line between what is the photographed object and what is a raw intervention into one of the many stages of developing a photograph.
Photo: Lukas Matuschek