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070408: Galerie Bleich-Rossi - Albert von Ostrowski
Galerie Bleich-Rossi: Aribert von Ostrowski – The Diamond is not a Maximum
Naturalism
“An animal can easily be comprehended if you look at its outer shell”. This sentence pertaining to the field of natural sciences was coined by the French biologist George Cuvier; but like many other things, such as idiosyncrasy, hybrid, degeneration, it found its way into the field of aesthetics. Hippolyte Taine has taken this sentence and made it to a catchy formula for his Milieu Theory. As a naturalistic credo it would then mean: one can easily comprehend an artist, if you know where he lives.
Aribert von Ostrowski lives in Berlin. As one says today - he works and lives where millions of other artists work and live. And in the midst of merciless competition and willy-nilly buddying the artistic outcome is somewhat metropolitan. The collages, mixed media, illustrations, and paintings currently displayed at Gabriella Bleich-Rossi’s make this obvious. They have something coarse and mangy, a premonition of a survival struggle. They are paintings created in a major city, graffiti leaving its mark, some backgrounds made of newspapers, and when things get too abrasive, sentimentality presides through the usage of the format filling words “House in the heath”.
Twenty years ago Aribert Ostrowski lived in Munich. And it seems as if nothing has changed regarding his characteristic style. During the 80’s Ostrowski, born 1953, was a cool conceptualist, a gauger of the meta-levels, a picture scientist avant la lettre, whose reflective constructions were partly met with incomprehension in Munich, where everybody at that time was infatuated by adornments. But somehow his works managed to fit into the city’s “this is none of my business” atmosphere and its distinctive aesthetic attitude of “Mir san Mir” (we are who we are).
But there is none of all that now. Really none of it? Helmut Draxler wrote the accompanying text for Ostrowski’s exhibit. The same Draxler who quasi usurped the Münchner Kunstverein in 1992 and decreed that it should adhere to social reality. But this reality remained oblique, not written all over, captured analytically by people such as Terry Eagleton or Ernesto Laclau. Back then Ostrowski went along with the balancing act and accordingly the harshness of his current work is theoretically appeased. In the Viennese case: through Sigmund Freud. One can easily recognize an artist if you look at his outer shell. This shell is the art industry.
Galerie Bleich-Rossi
1010 Vienna– Dominikanerbastei 19, until 17.05.08
www.bleich-rossi.at
Mehr Texte von translated and summarized by: Liz Wollner-Grandville
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070408
Galerie Bleich-Rossi
1010 Wien, Dominikanerbastei 19
Tel: +43-676-3569 698
Email: galerie@bleich-rossi.at
http://www.bleich-rossi.at
Öffnungszeiten: geschlossen
Galerie Bleich-Rossi
1010 Wien, Dominikanerbastei 19
Tel: +43-676-3569 698
Email: galerie@bleich-rossi.at
http://www.bleich-rossi.at
Öffnungszeiten: geschlossen
