Luisa Kasalicky
Siegfried ZaworkaMedleys, Reliefs and Color Charts

Exhibition

Domgasse 6

1010 Vienna

11 Mar – 23 Apr 2022

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Assembled choruses, interfering levels, trial and (artistic) error – for Theodor W. Adorno, the style of the medley in popular American music was just too unbearable for him to address it explicitly in his writings on music theory.

The practice of transferring a multitude of musical themes out of their original contexts into an overarching composition was very popular already in the English Renaissance. Rhythmic and harmonic modulations were used to try to patch over the unavoidable breaks between the individual elements of a best-of medley

In analogy to the musical form of the medley, yet this time visual, Luisa Kasalicky and Siegfried Zaworka have assembled fragments of older series of their works into new artworks. In the picture series Medleys by Zaworka, rhythmic and harmonic modulations refer to the formalization of pictorial elements. Taken from already completed series of paintings, drawings, and prints, these elements are assembled into square, emblematically compressed panel pictures – like the work Medley 17’, which includes the repertoire of forms from the installation-like painting called Funktionale (2017/19).

Kasalicky’s canvas Tag bei Nacht (Day at Night) is also based on the installation with the title Wovon sprechen wir? (What Are We Talking About?) (2021), which consists of montage sculptures. The artist juxtaposes her pictorial and reflective, rectangular new version, which is leaning against the wall, with the organic forms of her original installation, which are embedded in an indentation in the exhibition room. We can find hints about the combination of colors, written in hand in each respective hue, on the frame of the picture. The subjective and analytical element of these color experiments is interlocked with the more objective systematics of samples of binding agents, pigments and varnishes on no longer used charts from the art academy.

A cutout resembling a palette, and actually used by Kasalicky and Zaworka as a palette, seems to be saying: “Keep painting, or the paint will dry on me and form a relief!”

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Siegfried Zaworka