The fact that Oberthaler’s geometric abstraction functions as contemporary art is due to a number of strategies the artist employs in the realization of his work that keeps it from merely perpetuating a historically established style. One of these strategies involves designing tables, paravents, curtains, partitions and vitrines in an approach adopted from the critical context-art of the 90s. His wall painting at Bianca D'Alessandro in Copenhagen, which takes its colour from the facade of the building housing the gallery, is perhaps the most overt coupling of painting and context-art in Oberthaler’s work.
Mirrors resurface time and again among the materials, stemming from an interest in contextual concerns – mirrors not only reflect but also, in certain cases, distort. A further strategy for contextualising abstraction is the artist’s use of representational images. Oberthaler uses borrowed images primarily from magazines and/or online sources, and prints them in grid format on aluminium panels. The arrangements are reminiscent of the work of Andy Warhol and Peter Roehr. Roehr, who died in 1968 aged only 23, assembled collages of advertising material in grid format, sizing the selections so that the images remained intact, and did not assume an abstracted pattern. Oberthaler’s figurative elements are selected not only by proportion, but also for their high light/shade contrast, rendering them capable of achieving a much more abstract quality.
In terms of surface, Oberthaler’s painted and printed works are almost indistinguishable. The aluminium is painted with a very smooth, polished primer, with inevitable traces from processes such as masking resulting in sharply delineated shapes. Oberthaler not only references representational images as the dominant visual form of today (and using a concreteness very specific to the time of his artistic beginnings), even his paintings, which often look printed, always stay at least in clear sight/reach of contemporary printing techniques. Thus some works call to mind pixelated computer graphics or the raster lines of vacuum tube monitors, which are now relegated to the technological past.
For his exhibition at Bianca D'Alessandro he borrows John Cage’s declaration of independence at the occasion of a Robert Rauschenberg exhibition in 1953, “No Subject, No image, No taste...” referring to all transcendentalism, and much more than just an exhibition title. The assertion of a reality external to the image, Oberthaler seems to be saying, can no longer be a discursive category in post-modernism.
Christoph Bruckner
Nick Oberthaler (Bad Ischl/Austria, 1981) lives and works in Vienna. Recent solo shows include Pièce dérivée, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris (2015); Calculated Reserve (Cur. Pier Paolo Pancotto), Museo Hendrik C. Andersen/Galleria nazionale d'arte moderna, Roma (2014); The blackbird must be flying (together with Thomas Julier), Centre d’art bastille/CAB, Grenoble (2015); Eventuality of an attempt, KIOSK, Gent (2013); Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna (2012) and Galerie Martin van Zomeren, Amsterdam (2012). Group shows (selection): Rideaux/BLINDS (Cur. Marie de Brugerolle), Institut d'Art Contemporain/FRAC Rhône-Alpes, Villeurbanne/Lyon (2015); Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit, Kunsthalle Vienna (2014); Vers une hypothèse (Cur. Andrea Rodriguez Novoa), Francheville, CAC Fort du Bruissin/Programme Résonance - XII Biennale de Lyon, Lyon (2013); Die Sammlung # 4, 21er-Haus / Belvedere Vienna (2013); De leur temps 4: Nantes, Centre d’art contemporain Le Hangar, Nantes (2013); Minimal Myth (Cur. Francesco Stocchi), Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2012).
