March 8, 2023 - April 8, 2023
VILTIN Gallery is delighted to present the duo exhibition of Rita KOSZORÚS and Andreas WERNER titled What we built and what they built for us. Two artists, two imaginative worldviews. They deal with the theme of human longing and the stages of an artistic quest reflecting on the fundamental questions of human's place and existence in the world in spatial constructions and abstract compositions, sometimes utopian, sometimes lyrical.
Slovak-Hungarian painter Rita KOSZORÚS won Maľba - The VUB Foundation's award for young painters in 2021, in the Slovak contemporary art scene where the abstract painting is only an outsider.
The 2022 STRABAG Artaward International winner Andreas WERNER is a German-Austrian artist whose drawings using a unique technique have now become emblematic.
Rita KOSZORÚS uses the collage in her abstract paintings as a subject and form, reflecting on avant-garde and Dadaist artistic predecessors and aspirations. KOSZORÚS works with the language of abstraction, communicating with the viewer by pairing layers and shapes: different qualities, contradictions, gestures, painting methods, and textures meet and oppose each other in her compositions, where the relation of elements to each other and to space shapes their final image. Her canvases are both a surface and a material, shaped by folding and creasing, placing the randomness in his consciously evocative compositions. Her "material use" thus involves the surface and the shaping of the entire material, while abstraction allows her the free flow of unconscious processes and contents. Her key concepts of collective memory, nostalgia, home, or identity reappear. In collage-like paintings, new contexts are created through multiple materials and techniques, even with completely different materials, leading the viewer through new combinations toward a suggestive artistic reality.
Andreas WERNER combines the tradition of Romantic landscape painting with the utopian worldview of science fiction literature (Stanisław Lem). His monumental buildings float like a heavy architectural model in a sterile contextless space. The architectural imagery of the geometric elements in the structure-emphasized drawings is linked to brutalist architecture, while the non-functional constructions drawn from an exaggerated perspective lead the viewer towards surrealism, evoking the specific atmosphere of the heyday of filmmaking (Alejandro Jodorowsky, Fritz Lang) simultaneously. These shape-dominated pseudo-buildings can be seen as sculptures, robots, or even futuristic spaceship designs, deliberately balancing on the borderline of interpretation. He creates structures and systems out of architectural elements; he suggests strength and classical values while contradicting them. The dissonance that permeates WERNER's work - the floating nature of heavy constructions and the aesthetic/symmetrical yet un-functional building parts that operate with classical architectural elements - creates tension that transcends architectural or artistic references and therefore can be seen as a pillar of a particular (fantasy) world. In his recent works, the monochromatic compositions of solid contrast are given their final form through post-coloring, evoking the archival photographic and film color post-production of the early 20th century. WERNER's gesture can be compared to the phenomenon of retrospective falsification, known from psychology, which allows a retrospective, unconscious reworking of memories according to our inner needs. The post-coloring of the works testifies to the need to process the past, giving the compositions a nostalgic overtone and expanding their associative field.
Rita KOSZORÚS (*1989, Bratislava, Slovakia; lives and works in Bratislava and Berlin) studied at the Vsvu - The Academy of Fine Arts & Design in Bratislava from 2008-2014, graduating with a degree in graphic art, painting, and art pedagogy. In 2012, she participated in the summer semester of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts under the guidance of Imre Bukta and Péter Kiss. In addition to solo exhibitions in Bratislava, Budapest, Milan, Zlín, and Nitra, her works are regularly included in group exhibitions in Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Germany. Since 2016, she has participated in international residency programs (Hungary, Germany, France, Portugal, Czech Republic). In the autumn of 2022, her solo show was on view at the Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum in Bratislava. In addition to numerous private collections in Slovakia and abroad, her works are included in the contemporary collection of the National Bank of Hungary.
Andreas WERNER (*1984, Merseburg an der Saale, Germany; lives and works in Vienna and Unterolberndorf) graduated in 2012 as Gunter Damisch's student at the graphic department of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Before, he studied at the graphic department of the University of Applied Arts Vienna from 2004-2006 and was a student at the Faculty of Theatre, Film, and Media Studies at the University of Vienna from 2003-2005. Among several international residencies, he was awarded the Lower Austrian Art Scholarship and spent extended periods as a resident of Krinzinger Projekte in Hungary. In 2016, he received the MUSA Prize for Young Artists from the City of Vienna and the Lower Austrian Art Award. In 2022, he won the STRABAG Artaward International. His solo exhibition was on view at the Kunsthalle in Krems in 2021. In addition to numerous private collections in Austria and abroad, his works are in the collections of the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, the Universalmuseum Joanneum/Neue Galerie Graz, the Collection of the Republic of Austria - 21er Haus Wien, the City of Vienna Collection, the Provincial Collection of Lower Austria and the Budapest History Museum - Budapest Gallery.