Galerie Klaus & Elisabeth Thoman is proud to announce its eleventh exhibition with Gunter Damisch, which will bring together examples from some of the artist's most important work series. Felder, from 1985, is one of the pictures shown in the seminal Hacken im Eis exhibition at the Kunsthalle Berne and the Museum of the 20th Century in Vienna in 1986, curated by Ulrich Loock, Wolfgang Drechsler, Peter Weibel and Denys Zacharopoulos. Dunkler Aufstieg, from 1984, was the opening image to Damisch's solo exhibition In meinem Leben ist nichts genau at the Kunstverein Braunschweig in 1987. A group of pictures, including Weltwegdichte (2004) or Wegverschränkungsnetz (2005) as well as the ink-on-paper works entitled Weltverschlingungen, formed part of the exhibitions Neue abstrakte Malerei aus Österreich at the Shanghai Art Museum, the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, the Shaanxi Art Museum, and the Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangshou, and were presented, in 2005, at the MUMOK Vienna, together with paintings by Erwin Bohatsch, Herbert Brandl, Hubert Scheibl, Walter Vopava, and Otto Zitko, in the exhibition China retour. The most recent works, from 2011 and 2012, see a new aspect in Damisch's painting come to the fore, which he also hints at in the respective titles. The artist prints directly on the canvas, then sticks self-made prints on Japanese paper on them, finally to complete the composition by painting on them in oil, as for instance in Weltcollagenfeld (2011). A series of finely structured, and occasionally soaring, new bronze sculptures completes the exhibition.

Gunter Damisch, born in 1958, lives in Vienna and Freydegg. From 1978 to 1983, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, in the master classes of Max Melcher and Arnulf Rainer, and has received numerous prizes, e.g. the Otto Mauer Prize and the Max Weiler Prize in 1985. Since 1992, he has been a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
A crucial aspect in Damisch's artistic development is the relationship between painting and drawing, between the options of paint applied in several, pastose layers on the one hand and those of the line as a narrative element on the other. His vital handling of colour goes hand in hand with a fairly unorthodox formal language, clearly rooted in the medium of drawing.
After unscrambling the agglomerated paint in his pictures from the 1980s, Damisch came to command two visual elements: a surface contracted mostly into an insular form, and a meandering line. Normally a large number of linear and surface elements are distributed in ornamental arrangements more or less evenly over the canvas, either isolated or sticking together to make large figures, and placed opaquely on a nuanced ground. (...)
By combining the process of layering with unscrambling the visual inventory, Damisch has achieved a compactness in his paintings that not only corresponds to that of his older ones, but can also satisfy his penchant
for well-ordered relationship that are amenable to analysis. At the same time, he has undertaken a curious interpretation of the individual color particles of his previous works: the contours of the color patches and of the lineation that pervades the picture field – and even of the gestural traces and the trails of runny paint – have all been populated by dense rows of regular, miniaturized, outwardly-directed pegs. These pegs “knit” the various levels of the paintings together, and can also be read as people. One significant difference between the paintings of the 1980s and 1990s is between pictoriality and scripturality: Damisch’s recent pictures are not figural but scriptural. They combine the all-enveloping aspect of the painted field with legibility of visual ciphers, which for their part reduce the field character of the work (its abstract side) to the context of a script. No sooner has this legibility been noted than the painting’s elements all become objects that may potentially be read. (from Ulrich Loock, Das Zeitgenössische in heutiger Malerei, exhibition catalogue to China retour, MUMOK, Vienna 2005)
Thanks to his unmistakeable, convincingly and consistently formulated repertoire of colours and forms, Gunter Damisch is internationally regarded as one of the outstanding representatives of contemporary Austrian art.

Gunter Damisch