Exhibition by Helmut Swoboda
Das Große hinter dem Sichtbaren
Exhibition: 11.11.2011 – 13.1.2012
“Das Große hinter dem Sichtbaren“ (the Great behind the Visible) is something which fascinates almost all of us though without being able to really comprehend it. The general effort of arctiulation such a Great often culminates in emotive picture postcard idylls.
Helmut Swoboda succeeds in making visible evolutionary dimensions dynamically like in time lapse by adopting overstrained stereotypes, dissects and reduces them in order to finally compress them in many transparent layers into an abstract composition. The painter not merely depicts, doesn‘t intend to illustrate under no circumstances, but implements the creation process of the motive. The picture evolves from out of the craft of painting.
In the course of his multilayered working process colour is poured or painted on the canvas which is placed on the floor, taken off and wiped away the colour again. Helmut Swoboda, who attended the master class of Prof. Wolfgang Hollegha at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, utilizes the characteristics of the materials whose structure impacts on the artwork.
The variety of natural phenomena and their constant changes are the source of inspiration for Helmut Swoboda. He always emanates from the objective, abstracts and adumbrates. Nevertheless the viewers recognise the recurrent, characteristic motive lake Gosau in front of Dachstein mountains or the raging, splashing and wriggling water at the defile of Stillenstein in his abstract pictures. In his pictures rocks, water, forest, clouds flow into each other and facilitate the viewers to feel the objective model as well as enjoy the total abstraction therein. Helmut Swoboda contrives to fasten the exciting state at the border between these two worlds.
zs art gallery presents Helmut Swoboda with his quiet, monumental pictures, another student of Emil Toman at the Vienna Federal Training and Research Institute of Graphic Arts, after showing Walter Angerer-Niketa and Guido Zehetbauer-Salzer. Helmut Swoboda says about Emil Toman: “He was well capable of transmitting art to us and what it was all about: in particular that it had to do with more than merely depicting something skillfully.“