Meet Elisabeth Wedenig

Gallery70 is happy to present a solo online exclusive show with recent works by Elisabeth Wedenig. The selection includes works by the series Growing together, In bloom and Being An / No Island

"Elisabeth Wedenig (*1980 St. Veit/Glan, Austria) studied at the art academies in Riga and Athens as well as from 2004–2008 at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in the master classes of Hubert Schmalix and Amelie von Wulffen. She is among the young artists who, within the contemporary pluralism of media, focus on painting and panel painting. The choice of means is as diverse as the themes and subjects. Her interest lies in the immanence of painting itself. For her, the theme of abstraction versus figuration is a "both-and" – not through different cycles of work, but always within a single painting. The intensity of her motifs develops from unexpected color choices, but especially from a confidently and clearly set lineament.

Elisabeth Wedenig has been drawing since her childhood. Drawing remains an important part of her work to this day. Her world of motifs is fed by memories, dreams, perceptions of her surroundings, and impressions from her numerous travels, which have taken her from Scotland to exotic countries, from Cuba through Mexico to Tobago. Sometimes, art history also forms the basis, such as the frescoes by Anton Kolig in the Carinthian Landhaus, which were destroyed under the influence of the Nazis in 1938, from which she took motifs and painted a large cycle of paintings for an exhibition at the Museum of the Nötsch Circle, or the dynamic, color-intensive Baroque painting itself. But her paintings always lead us into a fanciful dream world full of poetry and surprises.

Many motifs, as Elisabeth Wedenig explains, only develop during the painting process. Memories emerge and are integrated into the composition. The choice of colors is also more intuitive and not strategically premeditated. Often, she initially paints directly on the canvas, allowing the color to be absorbed by the fabric, and only then applies a primer, preparing the basis for further layers of paint. Transparent and opaque areas are juxtaposed, not only delineating the motifs but also generating a compositional space on the canvas. Her pictures thus build up, as she says, in a "collage-like" manner. The people in her paintings are often embedded in a tangle of flowers and plants or entirely in an abstract mesh of colors, gradually coming into the viewers' field of vision. While her early paintings were more precisely painted, with animals, plants, and people clearly separated from one another, everything now seems to merge in a dynamic movement. The figurative motifs are also no longer painted as realistically and plastically but sometimes rendered abstractly with broad brushstrokes. Elisabeth Wedenig skillfully connects the individual subjects and color fields, creating a new reality within the painting. The distorted areas also serve to simultaneously bring different narrative levels into the composition. There is always something mysterious about her paintings, leading us into the depths of hidden feelings and memories. They are figurative-narrative, even lyrical representations, whose titles stimulate our imagination. Paintings such as "Of the Love of Foxes" or "In the Updraft, Feathers Grew on Him" act as soothing counter-concepts to real everyday life, transporting us into another world, into a surreal dream world."

On the occasion of the exhibition "True Colors", House of Arts, Hangar-7 Red Bull, Salzburg, 2023.
text: Silvie Aigner