Siegfrieed
Anzinger’s oevre is one big challenge. By using the same motifs over
and over, the artist reexamines the handed-down capacities of painting
and rehearses new options. With his recent works, as also exhibited
until 13 March 2011 at Lentos Linz, Anzinger has extended his
traditional repertoire of motifs -i.e. paradise and eros, Madonna snd
Child, Pietá, Holy Family, or Virgin and Child with St. Anne, as well as
animals, self portrait, cart – by a Wild West theme. And so very
diverse landscapesare now also populated by saddled horses, cowboys,
settler’s carts and Indians. Taking the apperance of witty comics, these
are masterfully composed paintings, though. Anzinger, well aware of the
painting techniques developed through the history of art, in a variety
of ways combines the elements at his disposal, from the autonomy of
colour as a monochrome plane to the contour line, only appearing to
circumscribe the figure itself.
In his recent works, the artist
pushes the boundaries of painting in a variety of ways, ultimately
arriving at a situation in which painting’s generic contours begin to
blur with those of drawing […] One the one hand, graphic elements and
paint are able to complement one another, but on the other , they
question the specific qualities of each respective genre. It is decisive
for the artist that all the components are maintained within a
precarious equilibrium. On account of this, the work process in each
individual painting represents a hazardous enterprise. Accordingly, the
knowledge that one might fail provides a substantial motivation for each
of Anzinger’s works. […] This structural principle, in which the
compositional means and elements refer to one another across the surface
of the canvas in a kind of formal spatial resonance, contributes
significantly to the transference of the essentially sketch-like
structure of the work to a context that, for its part, identifies the
whole as much more than a fleeting, dashed-off compositional idea.
quoted
from Guido Reuter “Siegfried Anzinger Malerei, Zeichnung und Plastik:
Betrachtungen der neueren Werke Siegfried Anzingers”, in: Stella Rollig
(ed.), Siegfried Anzinger, Cologne 2010
