Hans Aichinger
Der weisse Anfang
19.01. – 02.03.2014

“Creating a reality behind the reality of the image is what art can do: to go beyond the everyday and evoke the visionary, the imagined. Aichinger’s old-fashioned insistence on the mysterious and the unnameable seems provocatively relevant today in our modern world, in which sobriety and reason are required, in which everything is predictable. With him we can learn to be amazed. An astonishment that is not immediately a duty of understanding. It can go beyond or fall short of this and has little to do with imparting knowledge and insight. Anyone who lets themselves be unsettled in this way must get used to being led in undesirable directions. […] Aichinger concentrates on freezing movements, projecting the unanswerable into empty centers and stretching the measure of time. This creates parables of slowness and futility that also illuminate each other. They draw on the pool of great productions. […] Aichinger shows how fragile the connection to reality is. Above is devotion, below is the attitude to life of our times. The artistic self as a control point for any attempt to classify what is perceived mobilizes confusing intensities. Images that fascinate and at the same time distance because they are so clear and yet difficult to understand, because Aichinger always goes all out and does not spare himself. Aichinger anchors himself on the back of the bleak success society, from where he looks all the more closely at the cultural distortions while he works on his concentration exercises. What could be wrong with this rejection of the shallowness of mass culture and an existential, antiquated claim to the spiritual, to meaning and understanding of the world?”

Text extract from: Christoph Tannert “In the beginning there is light, in the end nothingness” in: “Hans Aichinger. Truth or duty” Hirmer 2013.

Curated by Thomas Trümper.