Michael Horsky :
Installation For the Kunstraum Weikendorf

Hermann Nitsch once said in an interview that as a cultural landscape the countryside of the Weinviertel is the landscape of the Thirty Years War. With this statement in mind, and with a sense of the barrenness of a landscape ravaged by war centuries before, Horsky approached Weikendorf and its surroundings and found himself, as he says, in a cliché-like field of projection for larger contexts. A series of photographs was produced during his research on the locality that showed him the striking points of crystallisation in the process of painting about Weikendorf. The plague memorial, the church and the expansive landscape were reference points and the point of departure for a six-part series of large format oil paintings, of which his installation was made. The human figure, especially as a portrait, is usually the starting point for Horsky's figurative paintings. For his project at the Kunstraum Weikensdorf the regional countryside became a key motif into which he almost weaves his figures. Haggard or absurdly over-sized bodies, painted far from any traditional aesthetic convention, form disturbingly enigmatic scenes between the recognisable fixed points in the community. His paintings reacted to the exhibition space as a “sculpture”, which is how he felt about the space. "I'm filling this concentrated atmosphere with a concentrated structure. …I let artificial figures and real figures interact in an undefined play: a play with neither a beginning nor an end, across time" (Michael Horsky).