Jürgen Messensee, born in Vienna in 1936, is one of the leading artists of his generation and has secured himself a firmly established place in the context of contemporary painting and graphic arts in Austria. Nature has always been his inspiration, above all the human figure, which the artist dissolves into an emblematic form with a perceptible tendency towards expressionist gesture. They are coded appropriations of nature, which then manifest themselves for instance as female swimmers, catamarans or mouths. In recent years, Messensee has augmented drawing and painting with the reproductive process of the jet print; he also greatly enlarges existing drawings and paints on this substrate. What matters to him is the displacement and manipulation of perception: what is real and what is fiction?

Curator: Florian Steininger