Siegfried Anzinger

With his new oil paintings and sculptures Siegfried Anzinger makes a radical break. He breaks in particular with the impasto application of paint so typical of his pictures, with his distinctive pictorial manner of rendering the figure, with a palette at times reminiscent of northern Italy – in short, with painting conceived in painterly terms. And the effect is like a light suddenly flaring up. For Siegfried Anzinger now applies the background tones swiftly and thinned, and out of a detail – a looping movement in a range of hills, say – he builds up an epic clearly graduated into distinct pictorial planes. Previously, by contrast, the figures and scenes had come into their own in a space that seemed sealed off, roughly as in a chamber play. With his new painting Siegfried Anzinger has drawn back the curtain and prepared the grand stage for it. What is fantastic here is not only the way in which images drawn from all manner of cultural techniques (rock, pop, comics, the Renaissance and the Western) vie with one another to capture the gold train, but also the way in which a painterly panorama is unfurled with deliberate drama – a panorama in which the epics of David, Delacroix or Géricault had already given cause for dreaming.

Exhibition:
Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, 26/11/2010 – 6/3/2011