Ausstellung

Works by Alexander Ruthner, Jakob Gasteiger, and Peter Niedertscheider

Exhibition duration: April 13 to May 31, 2026
Opening hours: Sunday from 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM and Monday from 12:00 PM to 3:00 PM

The exhibition showcases three very different positions by Jakob Gasteiger, Peter Niedertscheider, and Alexander Ruthner, which fundamentally engage with material, structure, color, and sensual perception. Gasteiger frees painting from expression and representation and understands it as a structured, bodily trace of the process. His relief-like imagery provides a soothing purity and clarity to our dense, information-overloaded existence, giving the viewer a meditative space, yet transcending mere painting. Niedertscheider translates painting into space with precise stone reliefs and mediates between illusion, surface, and plastic reality. He plays with an interplay of tradition and modernity, captivating the viewer with his ingenious stone sculpture by working with patterns of perception. Ruthner arranges the medium of painting into scruffy, wild, and delicate botanical subjects by transforming traditional motifs through serial transformations into a floating, contemporary understanding of images. Content takes a backseat to materiality, structure, process, and perception.

Jakob Gasteiger *1953, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg and is regarded as a defining representative of analytical painting. Since the early 1980s, he has developed a consistently reduced body of work that deals with materiality, structure, color, and perception. Over the years, he has turned to the processual aspect. His works are created through the use of self-constructed tools, with which he formerly applied oil paint, and now acrylic, in a consistent reduction over the canvas, simultaneously creating a relief-like structure. Color appears alongside the rhythmic structure as a carrier of expression. In the reduction of gesture and composition, Gasteiger directs attention to fundamental conditions of the image, such as surface, repetition, and time. His works reside at the intersection of painting and object and reflect the possibilities of painting beyond representation and narration.

Peter Niedertscheider *1972, studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna in the master classes with Alfred Hrdlicka and Brigitte Kowanz. His relief works, primarily crafted from marble and limestone, combine traditional stone sculpture with a conceptual understanding of space, playing with patterns of perception and levels. The "Rilievo schiacciato," a classic technique of the Italian Renaissance, is transferred by the sculptor into a contemporary visual language. The starting point is often still lifes, whose motifs are reorganized through geometric grids. Particularly characteristic is his work with extremely flat reliefs, where minimal elevations in the millimeter range, in interplay with light and shadow, create a surprising plasticity. Themes such as interior space, partitioning, and perspective are negotiated just as much as the tension between the temporal and reality. Historical backgrounds from the Renaissance are meticulously laser-engraved into the marble and are attracted by the tourist streams of the 21st century, represented as low reliefs. The conscious juxtaposition of finely worked and left raw surfaces gives his "beach pieces" a contemporary, Non Finito quality.

Alexander Ruthner *1982 studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna with Daniel Richter and Peter Kogler, at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf with Albert Oehlen, and in Athens. Generous coolness and casual gestures appear randomly distributed across his paintings. In his painting, Ruthner combines classical image traditions in his grassland pieces with abstractly modified natural elements and floral references to landscape painting. Fascinatingly, a layering emerges that surprises the viewer; brushstroke and materiality create a fragile temporality, in which coming into being and passing away become visible simultaneously. In his series, Ruthner transforms a motif through serial variation until it tips into surreal image spaces. This creates a vibrating depth of image, where repetition, displacement, and dissolution connect into an open image process.