EXIT is a term which has recently been heavily used in the media (Brexit, Grexit, Öxit,...). Formally, the letters embossed in the paper seem to fall out of the picture or dissolve with the diagonal creating a border or disjunction between colors and surfaces. In the international ship alphabet, the flag with the diagonal dividing line also means “man over board”.
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The work of Austrian artist Nick Oberthaler (*1981, Bad Ischl) is situated in the largely unoccupied space between this ultima ratio and the stylistic stewardship of the legacy of Concrete Art, using a wide variety of strategies in order to avoid being smothered by the historicity of geometric abstraction. One of these is to think of geometric abstraction not from an imagined historical centre, but from its margins.
As in the art of the Digital Natives, a technoid look is dominant in Oberthaler’s work. In his works on paper, which are often based on laser prints or use the technique, the correlations mentioned here are more pronounced. Media-specific opposition in painting is dropped in favour of an inherent flexibility. Oberthaler’s works on paper cannot be reduced tothe function of sketches or subsequent reproduction; they represent an independent sphere of his design theory which.
(text adopted from Christoph Bruckner)
Read our story with Nick from our studio visit.
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