Cristina Fiorenza / Andrea Freiberger / Regina Hadraba / Arjan Janssen / Andrea Maria Krenn

"Zeichnung_III"

Opening: Thursday, February 23rd 2012, 7pm
Duration: February 24th – March 17th 2012

Introduction: Ulrike Jakob, Galerie Hrobsky

For the third time, Gallery Hrobsky is participating in the festival Zeichnung_Wien. In the past years, this three-day-event has become a landmark in Vienna’s spring exhibition season.

This year, we are proud to introduce two new artists a tour gallery: Cristina Fiorenza and Andrea Maria Krenn.
Cristina Fiorenza, (IT) who won the 2011 Strabag recognition award, states about her practice: "My work is strongly influenced by investigating the culture of dwellings, by the fragile constructions of archaic peoples and nomads, questions of migration, of excessive urbanisation and the relation between metropolis and nature. But also, quite simply, an exploration of the boundaries of a city. Within the drawings, the focus lies on the subject of deception, journeys, but also the limits of human invention. Social, political, economic and ecological factors have made us vulnerable. The results of these explorations are dreamlike depictions. I work on the surface of paper with pencil, pastels, embroidery, fabric, collage. The drawings become sculptural." (C. Fiorenza)

Andrea Freiberger (A): Daily Scrapage, which the artist started in May 2009, is a visual and very private diary. Andrea Freiberger’s goal was to produce a picture sized A4 for every day spent in Vienna. Originally intended to run for one year, the project evolved its own dynamic. 612 pages were created that represent the exact duration of two years. At Gallery Hrobsky, 160 collages documenting 160 days in Vienna from October 2009 until March 2010, are shown, filling up walls like an open book:

Headlines and photos taken from the yellow press, combined with well-known art historical images, private photos and two dimensional objects like broken CDs, plastic sheets and feathers illustrate thoughts and feelings of a specific day: Society and politics, age and death, love and the well-known struggle between the sexes, type casting and its clichés, pure nonsense and specific events. Daily Scrapage uses informative, readable text and illegible handwriting as creative elements that structure the collages: script as a form of graphic, cacography in the sense of indecipherable scribbling, personal codes hidden within the pictorial noise.

Regina Hadraba’s (A) new series of drawings, Silence, is based on Haikus by Dagmar Travner. Words are combined with images, apparitional forms develop from them and merge into drawings.

Every element in Hadraba’s artistic production accrues from an inner ambiguity that alternates between planned deliberation and immediate spontaneity. Black paint on paper – captured with spatula, stylus and pen. The result is characterised by a minimalism that simply suspects at which point a multitude of brushstrokes would detonate the pictorial boundaries.

The oeuvre of Andrea Maria Krenn (D), a young artist based in Austria, always leads back to the basic principles of space and painting. The essential media of her practice are space-oriented pieces as well as painting. Even though you won’t find classic panel-paintings among her works, painting itself plays an important role. Her work moves along the line between two- and three-dimensionality, within her paintings, not only visual spaces open up, but the whole picture carrier including the image is understood as an object within a space.
Andrea Maria Krenn’s practice is most convincing where she opens up the mysterious condition of our world within a transitory in-between state of space and painting. Her explorations of space follow the conceptual purpose of finding places between image and reality through an open concept environment of painting.

(excerpts: Martin Hochleitner)