Oliver Dorfer – the palemoon-,
pulp-, and other projects
October, 6 – November, 11, 2009
Opening: Tuesday, 6 October 2009,
7.30 p.m.
A catalogue is being published to accompany the exhibition.
hilger contemporary
1010 Vienna, Austria
Dorotheergasse 5
T: +43-1-512 53 15
F: +43-1-512 53 15
E: ernst.hilger [at] hilger.at
http://www.hilger.at
To write about this work is always difficult – to meet the right tone in order to reduce the complexity of the theme to a minimum.
“A successful image contains a shaken measure of visual information, which should elude itself from the cannibalisation of language.” (Oliver Dorfer, 2009)
The attempt of a meaningful, explanatory insight:
A picture says more than a thousand words. In the case of Oliver Dorfer‘s work, this saying is more than appropriate. Dorfer’s pictures should speak for themselves – by means of their own picture language, a syntax established out of signs from the world of films, comics, graphic designs and other pop culture influences that serve as the raw material for his work. The exhibition features an overview of the individual, parallel developing picture series that the artist describes as projects. Oliver Dorfer provides his new works with the description condensed graphic novel, thus ironically referencing the term graphic novel used in the Anglo-American world. The difference between film and comic is however that the comic strips are not ordered next to one another, but rather overlaid, creating interferences through the overlapping of the individual plains. This overlapping forms the essence of the picture – a type of multiple exposure. Dorfer accumulates and transforms picture sources and utilises multifaceted design arrangements that are available to the paintings. In his now almost two-decade career as an artistic, he has created a concise and distinctive picture language. His combination of different signs and symbols awaken associations, which however elude definite legibility – an effect that is desired by the artist. He combines classical painting, an eternal, perpetual and historically rich medium, with the discredited retro-technique of reverse-glass painting (acrylic on acrylic in his case) as well as with impressions and symbols from pop culture, which in return to the classics conveys the feeling of the rapid transience in a world of media.
Oliver Dorfer
Born 1963 in Linz, Austria.
Selected exhibitions
2009 Nordico, Museum der Stadt Linz
2009 Landesgalerie Linz
2009 hilger contemporary, Vienna
2009 Freight + Volume, New York
2008 Bonelli Arte Contemporanea, Mantova
2007 Artcore Gallery, Toronto
For further information please contact the gallery: ernst.Hilger [at] hilger.at
