Abel Auer at KIRCHGASSE

Artist: Abel Auer

Exhibition title: Schatten Meiner Selbst

Venue: KIRCHGASSE, Steckborn, Switzerland

Date: February 3 – March 29, 2018

Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and KIRCHGASSE, Steckborn

For Abel Auer, the shadow is as ambiguous as it is incisive: it is a doppelganger, ideal silhou-ette and “partner in crime” in developing new artistic methods. Auer describes his landscapes and portraits as “post-nuclear new symbolism.” Based on a desire to redefine concepts of “beauty,” “nai-vety,” and “transcendence” beyond postmodern art theories, his description bridges the gap between the nineteenth century and the present.

Auer developed his artistic range in numerous group contexts. In the early 1990s he founded Aka-demie Isotrop in Hamburg, followed by long-standing collaborations with figures including Kai Althoff, Dorota Jurczak and Armin Krämer. His intensive exploration of various forms of counter-culture, folk art and medieval iconography have always been channeled into painting, sculpture and film as the central focus of his work.

Auer’s “Wolkenbilder” (Cloud Paintings)—exhibited together at Kirchgasse for the first time—re-visit the elaborate formal vocabulary of Symbolism, while the gallery’s second room features one of his cinematographic painting installations. It too refers back to the nineteenth century, to the prehi-story of cinema in which the moving and narrative dimension of images was still entirely within the realm of painting. In the painting-cinema, Auer’s shadows become a “blend of self and the absence of light.”