Artists

Soli Kiani, Clemens Wolf

Press release

soli kiani, born 1981 in shiraz, iran, studied in christian ludwig attersee's painting master class at the university of applied arts in vienna. painting remains a theme in the artist's work today, although it is no longer the sole medium in which she works. kiani draws on the possibilities afforded by installations, objects, photography and painting for artistic realization of the contents and motifs she addresses. painting therefore fits into the conceptual context informing her entire oeuvre, although she also examines the parameters inherent in the media and questions all the roles that painting can assume. inspired by the idea of "plastic painting", she expands these works into space and turns the spotlight on the material in its own right. the objects and paintings show pieces of fabric, shaped into folds, that push their way from the edge to the centre of the picture as abstract forms on a white or black ground. on the one hand, this engagement with textiles has a formal-aesthetic basis, which soli kiani articulates with a deft artistic touch, tapping into the possibilities offered by each medium to develop abstract variations.
identity - soli kiani's oeuvre, silvie aigner

Clemens Wolf, born in 1981 in Vienna, Austria, studied at the University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz. He is fascinated by boundaries: boundaries of perception, boundaries of imagination, boundaries of the possible. Initially, he painted ruins, fences, or vacant lots. From these two-dimensional works, he made the leap into sculpture and plastic art. "Perhaps there is a need in painting to leave the canvas and become sculpture [...]", wrote Gilles Deleuze about the characteristic of Baroque. In Clemens Wolf's Parachute Paintings, the "all-over quality of the folds" is a core characteristic. While folds in the Baroque period were often constrained within the frame of the painting, Wolf's folds envelop the canvases in such a way that the frames, and thus the boundaries of the support, become invisible. The textures appear soft, as if one could smooth out or reshape the folds at any moment. This is an illusion, as the folds are hard, immobile, and rendered unchangeable by the epoxy. Wolf's works play with the viewer's perception. Irreversibility and transience run like a red thread through his oeuvre.