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Volta Basel 2024 | Mathias Kessler
Mathias Kessler is an Austrian artist living in Vorarlberg and New York who critically questions and reinterprets concepts of nature. In his artistic practice, Kessler uses the media of photography, painting, drawing, installation and performance. He deals with ecological, social and socio-critical themes. The content of his art is wide-ranging: romantic painting, land art and digital rendering compete and clash with each other in order to turn familiar opposites such as nature and culture, representation and experience and thus ideology and aesthetics on their head. Using various means, he negotiates the definition and interpretation of the relationship between society and economic interests in the world and its natural resources.
His meditative works in the painting series LIGHT PHENOMENA also show his analytical view of nature. While at the beginning of this series he always used photographs of light phenomena, more recently he has also used paintings by artists such as Claude Monet or Rembrandt as the basis for his pictures, which are reminiscent of color field paintings. Using spray paint applied in fine color gradients, the landscapes are transformed into abstract paintings. With these works reminiscent of colour field painting, Kessler captures a light phenomenon that has only existed since industrialization. The colorfulness of the light phenomena in the sky has changed with increasing air pollution. The special aesthetics of romantic sunsets or foggy landscapes are only created by the dirt particles.
Kessler can reflect on numerous international exhibitions and residencies. Among others, he has had solo exhibitions at the Kirchner Museum, Davos (CH), Kunsthal Rotterdam (NL), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder Colorado (USA), Palmengarten, Frankfurt am Main (DE), Rosphoto National Museum for Photography, St. Petersburg (RUS), GL Holtegaard Museum, Copenhagen (DK), Dommuseum, Vienna (AUT) and Kunstraum Dornbirn (AUT). His works are represented in numerous private and public collections.
