Wonnerth Dejaco, Vienna
Katharina Höglinger
In a large portion of the selection hereby proposed by us, Katharina Höglinger utilizes cardboard used for packaging as support for her oil paintings. As is typical for Höglinger’s practice, this banalest and vernacular material ends up as part of art objects, mainly because it is lying around in the studio, offering itself as fodder for the relentless painting machine that is KH’s artistic process. Conceiving her work as processual, she constantly switches between different formats, materials, techniques and motifs. Every piece she produces serves as an experimental ground for the next one. The learnings of past works are transposed to new constellations, always testing out the networks of relationships between the different elements that can make up a painting, always in movement, always becoming.
The other works proposed here are paintings in oil on canvas. Just like Höglinger deals with “low” found materials like cardboard, she re-uses existing styles and motifs from the history of painting as material, as a treasure trove from which to draw in order to create something of one’s own and contemporary. Yet KH does not only draw from art history, she also meets the challenge of the ever-changing fashions in the contemporary art scene head-on. Thus, she understands artistic fashions as culturally and politically relevant means of expression, which she integrates into her work in order to constantly question her own position itself and keep it relevant.
