The reciprocal dynamics generated by the relationship between photography and painting can be described as a history of the permanent redefinition of artistic standards and methods of representing reality, which has never ceased to determine the development of both media. The exhibition in the tresor shows a selection of works from the Bank Austria Art Collection presenting an in-depth view of the great range of interaction between the two media in the current Austrian art scene.

The status of painting was long held to be that of fiction, the creative imagination, whereas the quintessential characteristic of photography was to capture and reproduce reality in a documentary mode; painting, artistically autonomous but “illusionary”, was contrasted with photography, automatically generated yet “true”. The current works reveal that this historical polarisation has lost its validity in the age of “new” media and the avalanche of digital images. Advanced photographic and computer technologies are opening up a wide spectrum of potential hybrid imaging of photography and painting, whose relation to reality no longer consists in direct reproduction, but in the interpretation of a reality that has in any case always been conveyed in media. The works exhibited operate along the blurred transitions between documentary and fictional modes, which no longer allow an unambiguous clarification of image and reality, raising questions about the media’s production of meaning.

Artists: Michael Goldgruber, Sonia Leimer, Ines Lombardi, Eva Schlegel, Clemens Wolf

Curators: Heike Eipeldauer, Florian Steininger

Opening: February 26 2014, 7.30pm

Free entry