ART-PRESENTATION: Nick Oberthaler-SEQUEL

In his compositions, Nick Oberthaler uses numerous media: photographs, photocopies of images found in books, magazines or on the internet… The finishings are uneven: either very final or very sketchy. He wants to continually maintain the mystery of the associations that he chooses, and the uncertainty about what he truly wishes to reveal. He insists on the ambiguity of images, letting the viewer’s gaze wander and decide which point of reference to focus on within the œuvre.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Archive

Titled “SEQUEL”, Nick Oberthaler’s solo exhibition features five large-format, vertically hung canvases painted over the past two years and shown in the gallery Annex. The artist considers the title SEQUEL as a succession: not so much representing a kind of temporality or a specific narrative, but rather as a continuation of painterly concepts and their variation within the visual systems of the canvas’ composition. Through this series of works Oberthaler addresses geometric abstraction, its history, vocabulary and reading,  which can be understood as painting about painting. A Digital Native technoid look is dominant in these new works, with contemporary reproduction techniques and collaged geometric forms combined with writing, objective motifs or gestural and impasto elements. Highlighting fields within the canvas with hatching or by crossing them out, Oberthaler then marks individual places with an X or indicates the direction of reading or motion with arrows. The colurs he favours are reminiscent of the soft-ice-cream colours used by artists such as Jonathan Lasker or the chroma-keying hues in Heimo Zobernig’s work. Oberthaler subjects the pure forms of historical abstraction to a stress test, combining them with representational motifs and gestural elements, at the same time bringing them closer to contemporary reproduction techniques, making them into collages, using them contextually or in combination with functional objects or typographical elements. He is interested not so much in abstraction as a style – although in geometric abstraction style is generally unavoidable, the semantic field in this area being too wide – but as an exportable modus, thus opposing those who are merely administering a formal legacy, as well as avoiding the danger of treating former Concrete Art as a new Naturalism.

Info: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Villa Kast, Mirabellplatz 2, Salzburg, Duration:  27/1-16/3/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18;00, Sat 10:00-14:00, https://ropac.net