Kandinsky´s dream – a brief history of panel painting
Michaela Pedratscher

Exhibition: Central – New Art from New Europe
Siemens_artLab, Galerie Ernst Hilger, 2004-2006

Bernhard Wolf works with all kinds of semiological systems such as logos as a type of public sign-making. They are the fictive figures that embody ideological functions in public awareness. The viewer is confronted by a familiar image. These images, superficially seen, are nice and friendly, inviting and optimistic. They function like a gentle slide in what lies behind semiological systems and their strategies in mass-manipulation. In this way Bernhard Wolf evokes head-loops in the viewer. The three-part series „Eine kurze Geschichte des Tafelbildes“(Kandinsky series) derives from an extra head-loop of the artist, reaching back into the history of art. The small Kandinsky dreams himself out of landscape painting into abstraction. A great loop for painting.

Wolf demonstrates his achievements by exemplifying it as „a short history of panel painting“. He establishes the link to the logo in that the artist interprets the series as logo for painting. Bernhard Wolf defines his pictorial mode as a techincally executed act, painting by numbers without gesture or the will to compose. The basic motif is taken from a children´s book. It involves a combination of symbolically evocative signs which represent the panel painting and painting per se. In Wolf´s work the exposure of strategies and forms of communication is subjected to strict analysis and subtle criticism.

Michaela Pedratscher (AT) is curator for Galerie Ernst Hilger and the Siemens_artLab, Vienna