MAPPING MY THOUGHTS

"Art is a means of transforming one's own thoughts," emphasises Reinhold Ponesch. In May, the HOLLEREI Gallery dedicates an ambitious solo exhibition to the Austrian artist.

The works on display offer insight into the artistic practice of a passionately driven creator who has chosen the canvas as his creative playing field, using expansive gestures to create a colourful, loudly expressive, but also sensitive and profound visual world. All works were created in 2017 in New York, and the pulsating life in the "Big Apple" seems to resonate throughout – in the expressive visual language as well as in the choice of artistic media, where the boundaries between graffiti, drawing, painting, collage and assemblage (e.g. various fabrics) deliberately blur. Image fragments such as the American flag or a scribbled profile of Donald Trump also point thematically to contemporary America.

Stylistically, Ponesch refuses to commit; in his engagement with colour and material, abstract colour spaces emerge – and inscribed within them – bodies, faces and objects, scriptural and ornamental signs. Brash and dense, delicate and transparent, immediate and spontaneous: Ponesch's art is an intuitive engagement with the relationship between sign, surface and space, a constant dialogue between densely placed painterly sweeps and graphic counterpoints, a curious experimentation with paint application between expression and contemplation, a playful engagement with collaged elements. But it is also always an emotional engagement with society, humanity and the artistic self.

Text: Günther Oberhollenzer, Kurator Landesgalerie NÖ