Support for the Prize of the Kunsthalle Wien comes from DORDA BRUGGER JORDIS, attorneys.
Maria Pia Lattanzi (master class Adolf Frohner), this year?s Kunsthalle Wien prizewinner, presents her portrait series ?Jib Doors to Human Images?.
Taking the classic portrait as her point of departure, Lattanzi works from photographs of her subjects, abstracting them through various techniques and media. The persons portrayed are approached through painterly processes of alienation, transference and selection. In some cases the images are digitally manipulated. Lattanzi combines figurative and abstract elements in several work phases, reducing details to highly contrasted drawings reminiscent of silhouettes. Additionally, expressive and ornamental structures meld to the point at which background and subject become one. The complex net of images is characterized
by outlines and grids. In an interplay of forms, wallpaper patterns enter into a symbiosis with the subjects that confuses and challenges the gaze. The starting point for all of the paintings is a chair ? regardless of whether it is in the artist?s studio, in public space or in an exhibition.
curator: Gabriele Mackert