How to paint? What to paint? Why paint at all? Mar­tin Pras­ka paints to cre­ate some­thing new unseen, which at the same time reminds of the known, all too famil­iar. He likes to quote works of famous mas­ters to hold on to, to climb on the shoul­ders of giants and then to dare a lit­tle hop, prefer­ably with­out land­ing on his stom­ach. Art feeds on itself. Orig­i­nal­i­ty is desired but to a cer­tain extent only an illu­sion. Like every­thing. Like col­or itself, which is a pure inven­tion of our brain. All we can do are vari­a­tions of what is already there. Remixed, cov­er ver­sions, rein­ter­pre­ta­tions, to put it in the lan­guage of music pro­duc­tion. The actu­al goal is always a suc­cess­ful piece that has not been there before. He wants no ide­ol­o­gy, no social crit­i­cism, no lar­moy­ance about the state of the world in the pic­tures. Pras­ka wants a release from all this, in short, cathar­sis. There is no oth­er way to do this than through sen­su­al­i­ty. This is a tightrope walk between desire and con­tem­pla­tion. In this ambiva­lence lies the art. And thus it works against total­i­tar­i­an­ism and fanati­cism. Because it defies unam­bi­gu­i­ty. We don’t need art with a mes­sage. The art itself is the mes­sage. (Mar­tin Pras­ka)
Mar­tin Pras­ka, born in Wies­loch (D) in 1963, lives and works in Vien­na.
The exhi­bi­tion will fea­ture new works by the artist.