12.11.2009 - 15.01.2010
Current Exhibition
“When Otto Zitko stopped painting in the late eighties, this act did not reflect a kind of manifesto – something along the lines of "painting is dead for me, too"; he did not abandon painting, thus seemingly transcending it, the decision was paradoxically based on the self-critical and purifying reason that the only way to further develop painting is to pursue the line. The artist was not concerned with a kind of graphism as a fundamentalist ideology after the end of painting; much rather, Zitko uses the "long way of the line" (the title of a 1987 drawing) to leave a trace that precedes all painting. He prioritised drawing, which to him is the current form of painting, the flow of the continuous line, while ruling out that he is finally rejecting conventional painting.“
Lachmayer, H.: The long way of the line, 2000, http://www.zitko.at
Until 1987 Otto Zitko (born in 1959) mainly produced oil paintings characterised by the application of pasty layers of paint; after that, he turned increasingly towards drawing, which he detached from the intimate scale it was normally restricted to due to the range of movement of the hand, as he used large surfaces on stable supports. Working on paper-covered wooden panels, sooty glass panes and white-coated aluminium sheet, he expanded his spectrum of drawing, eventually acquiring a whole range of graphic possibilities. Otto Zitko's decision as to which culture of line to apply depends on the support or drawing material, format, conceptual basis or his own state. His work runs the gamut from probing scribble to informal gesture, figurations emerging from graphism, clear or broken lines. His interest in exploring and acquiring new materials more suited for the application of one or the other graphic vocabulary, or of the entire repertory concurrently and polyphonically, depending on their qualities, is characteristic of Zitko's notion of drawing.
Since 1989 he has also expanded it to space-occupying lines on walls, increasingly underpinning it with a painterly approach.
A specific feature of his in-situ works - e.g. Stichting de Appel Foundation, Amsterdam 1990, Wiener Secession 1992, Kunsthalle Bern 1994, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Gent 1996, Biennale di Venezia 1999, Cheim & Read, New York 2000, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams 2002, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki 2003, Museum of Contemporary Art KIASMA, Helsinki, 2005, Museum of Contemporary Art, Leipzig and MUSEION – Museum of modern and contemporary art, Bolzano, 2007, Hamburger Bahnhof/Museum fuer Gegenwart, Berlin 2009 - is to take instantaneous aesthetic decisions on the spur of the moment out of an intensified state of mind which he owes his energy to.
On the occasion of his first solo exhibition in Italy, a big wall installation and a selection of paintigs on aluminium-panels and works on paper will be on show at KLERKX from November 12th 2009 until January 15th 2010.
|