Artists

Vittorio Brodmann

Press release

Galerie Gregor Staiger is pleased to host Simulations, the seventh solo exhibition by Vittorio Brodmann at the gallery, bringing together his latest series of paintings and works on paper, pushing the artist’s concern with the relationships between pictorial elements further and exploring the possibilities of alternating between abstraction and the subject.

An intuitive process lies at the heart of the creation of these works. Left without an indication of where to look first the canvases and drawings suggest multiple image spaces and are charged with interior volatility. The characters populating the canvases contour animals, humans or hybrid shapes and are part of compositions characterized by conceptual tension. These protagonists aren't narrative characters, but vehicles for reflection on painting as a medium, that often read as a meta-commentary on painting history and its porosity.

The canvases resist stable meaning, navigating a terrain where illustrative closeness and formal autonomy coexist. A subtle humor contrasts with the seriousness of art history. The titles of the paintings, too, resonate with this openness. Frequently reduced to a single word or phrase—Pollution, Temporary Structure, Envy, Flat Landscape, Powered by Cows—they imply meaning only to subvert it upon closer viewing. The works on paper, all Untitled and formally unrelated to the paintings are generated through a practice situated between loose concept and ‚automatic drawing‘ while their graphic transparency echoes Brodmann’s interest in process and provisionality.

Across both gallery spaces, Simulations presents paintings and drawings conceived through a way of working the artist describes as a form of ‚thinking aloud’. Instead of offering resolution, the works remain intentionally unresolved, inviting to engage with the shifting terrain of image, meaning and interpretation.