Bertram Hasenauer

At the centre of Bertram Hasenauer’s work stands the portrait, or rather the figure, which, placed before a monochrome white or dark ground, does not function primarily as a (naturalistic) likeness but seeks instead to convey the idea of the portrait as such. In this way Bertram Hasenauer at the same time opens up for us a highly differentiated view of the young people in question, a view that emphasises what endures: everything spontaneous and dynamic has departed from them, they appear androgynous and seem to hover in space. In the face of the almost metaphysical remoteness from reality into which the figures appear to have been shifted, art criticism has invoked the concept of Magic Realism, which the artist is said to have extended by a spiral of the enigmatic. Bertram Hasenauer uses pictures from journals and magazines as the basis for his work. He applies his colours like a thin film onto a finely textured ground. The enigmatic impression of what, in the artist’s words, “appears to be a portrait proves to be the idea of a possible portrayed figure; what appears to be the image of a human figure vanishes at once into the vague spheres of the memory of a figure.”

Exhibitions:
Kunsthalle Memmingen, 1/4 – 23/7/2023
Galerie Ebensperger, Wien, 28/3 – 30/6/2023