MICHAEL HORSKY The flexibility of the four seasons.

The exhibition comprises a four-part corpus of works, accompanied by drawings created in 2023/24. Horsky's Four Seasons paintings bear witness to the heterogeneous identity of each individual work, which has buried dozens of paintings beneath it. In Crucifixion Flowers, 2024, only the title refers to the work's original Christian iconographic orientation. In the preliminary stages, the artist had painted crucifixion groups on wildly moving fields and subsequently whitewashed them with a sea of flowers or erased the figurations. The other three works are characterised by a stage-like structure with a flexible, rickety depth effect, which is at the same time contrasted by ornamental, two-dimensional elements. Horsky often draws inspiration from the masters of art history, from Jan Van Eyck to Willem de Kooning. In the centre ground of Concert, 2024, autobiographically determined protagonists form the Holy Family in the stable of Bethlehem after Piero della Francesca, while in the foreground of the picture there is an isocephalous row of expressive, sensual violinists - with Jan van Eyck's angels making music in the background. The village landscapes in the window openings merge with the stable wall to form an ornamental patchwork system. Fluid, meandering figurations, interwoven with their bicycles and benches, are embedded in the nocturnal Augarten park landscape, accompanied by the flak tower. In Wolfgang's Ladder, 2024, Horsky's professor becomes entangled in a twisted ladder in the precariously swirling painting space. The young artist begins his painting career as an abstract-gestural painter in the Hollegha class, but breaks with the doctrine of the non-representational by introducing the nose, mouth and eye into the picture, in the sense of abstractly controlled painting. It was Siegfried Anzinger's painterly portrait exhibition at Galerie Krinzinger in 1994 which prompted the young artist to take this step.

Michael Horsky's painterly practice is one of searching, struggling, rejecting, and ultimately finding. Horsky paints his pictures from the depths. The visible image is skin covering a multi-layered organism. Beneath it, it seethes - a new-wild, ecclesiastical carnage and roar of painting. The plot and the figuration are not representations decidedly made by the artist, but are flushed to the surface in an abstract process, where they emerge as a dissolved pictorial form. (Text: Florian Steininger, 2024)