Jakob Gasteiger, a native of Salzburg, has been one of the most distinguished representatives of Austrian painting since the 1980s. The Salzburg Museum is now dedicating its first solo exhibition to the artist in the Kunsthalle of the Neue Residenz. The curatorial concept combines a retrospective selection of works spanning Gasteiger’s career since the 1980s with focused explorations of key aspects of his artistic practice. Particular emphasis is placed on his engagement with colour, painting, and the object as central elements of his work. By bringing together representative works from different creative periods, the exhibition offers insight into the development of Gasteiger’s artistic language and highlights the distinctive contribution he has made to contemporary Austrian art.
Curatorial Statement
Jakob Gasteiger’s reputation is founded on paintings that emerge from a rigorously pursued and highly consistent artistic method. In an interview conducted in 1999, Gasteiger described his work as a process-oriented exploration of painting itself. For him, art consists in creating systems of actions and procedures through which images come into being without any iconographic intention. The repeated acts of applying paint and structuring the material of paint deliberately resist narrative content and representation.
Although Gasteiger’s oeuvre has since expanded beyond painting to include additional media, temporary forms, installations, and objects, this fundamental orientation toward painting remains unchanged. All of his artistic formulations continue to be developed from the perspective of painting. Central to his practice is the development of an image concept, combined with a commitment to treating painting as a pragmatic process governed by a clearly structured method of production.
The works present themselves through their own aesthetic qualities and through their distinctive treatment of colour as a material. On the one hand, they generate a meditative effect, which Gasteiger understands as existing in dialogue with music, literature, and philosophy. On the other hand, the paintings possess a remarkable physical presence. The interplay between their characteristic formal structure and the vulnerability of their textured surfaces creates a unique spatial impact that is specific to each individual work.
For Jakob Gasteiger, painting is a process through which the idea of the image is transferred into a transitional state between the “transcendence of the real, tendencies toward immaterialisation, and an intensified materiality and corporeality,” as described by Wolfgang Drechsler.
The framework for this exploration is provided by formal reduction, an artistic principle that Gasteiger employs with exceptional aesthetic precision and sophistication. Through this reduction, he creates works that are both conceptually rigorous and visually compelling, inviting sustained reflection on the nature of painting itself.
Biography
Jakob Gasteiger, born in Salzburg, 1953. Completed his studies at Mozarteum in Salzburg from 1970 til 1974. He lived and worked in Vienna and Weinviertel.
