| PETER
SENGL on and beyond Kubin |
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| 8 November to 2 December 2001 | |||||||||||||
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(Bette
Davis W.L.) Judith 16,7 reitet auf Lec - Zebra hinter weißen Gitterstäben, 2000 62,5 x 46,5 cm Exhibition Segment Biography |
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| Originally from Unterbergla in Styria, Peter
Sengl has been in Vienna for about 30 years as a discriminating and indefatigable
painter and draftsman. Within contemporary Austrian art, he has proven
himself as both a chronicler and cabaretist in one. The latter, of course,
relates to a view of life, of glitter and glamour, our behaviors and their
backgrounds, parties and exhibition openings, in short everything that
lifestyle and being there at all the attractions in and around Vienna
can offer, which he takes as impulse and object of his pictures. Engaging with Kubin is worth the effort, as the 30 works of the present exhibition prove. Sengl does so nearly 100 years after Kubin's electrifying, magnificent early work was made. By taking up analogies to Kubin's well known and famous pictures, the artist clearly follows the master's example on the one hand, but at the same time, he goes beyond Kubin's drawn findings and relativizes them within the framework of emblematics laden with torture instruments of every kind. A fascinating erotic panorama - often fixed in allegories - is stretched between pleasure and self-imperilment, ranging from Walpurgis Night, the 15 gates in the Red Sea, a horrifying mouth of a victim with a helmet, the buxom flying old women, and a horse-dog in hot pursuit, about to burst. There is a preference for twisting nearly everything, and those who are lucky, get a few stainless steel needles as well in Sengl's horror scenarios. Yet Peter Sengl's world is not as artificial, not as much mental work, speculation or cramp as it seems. In this particular case, with the proximity to Kubin, it appears instead to be much more drive-dynamic, as Wolfgang Müller-Thalheim has expressed it. In summary, the strikingly garbed man shows himself to be an observing and calculating realist, an inquisitor between yesterday and today, subjecting his counterpart to electric jolts between torture and rapture in his dangerously inventive paintings and drawings. A catalogue with 30 color pictures in published in conjunction with the exhibition, which concentrates on Sengl's Kubin paraphrases from the years 2000/2001. It includes texts by Wolfgang Müller-Thalheim and Peter Baum, and is available for ATS 140,- / € 10,17. |
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