Exhibition
Sandner’s laconic notes that are partly reminiscent of messages or comments that someone left on notepads, as well as his juxtapositions of words that deal with historic works of art or emotional conditions, also always comment on the circumstances of reproduction or the works’ surroundings and the social context of their origin respectively.
By addressing the spectators also as readers, he celebrates a skillful play with irony and wit, in which the perception of the painting itself appears in a seemingly secondary role.
The enormous scale of the canvases that follows the tradition of important 19th century historical paintings represents an absurd contrast to the vanity of the information given and the use of scribbles to mark it and write it down. The writing tool is a paint brush and by using watery acrylic paint Sandner often leaves drip marks that are part of the rhetoric vocabulary and the pathos of abstract painting.
Sandner deprives painting of its major role while skillfully celebrating it through determined artistic tricks, affects and codes. With these contradictory approaches Sandner involves the spectators in a game that leaves them astonished by a “double bind“ between attraction and rejection, shape, and shapelessness.
Text: Cosima Rainer
Translation: Christina Muigg
photos: Verena Nagl
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