With EXPLORATION: Landscape Jarmuschek + Partner will present current works by Petra Johanna Barfs, David Eager Maher and Michael Merkel from February 25 to April 8, 2017.

Historical images, mysterious spectacles of nature and hidden treasures form the sceneries which wait to be discovered in all the shown works. Petra Johanna Barfs’ sensitively combined collages of extracts from romantic landscapes by Caspar David Friedrich and Michael Merkel’s contrasting works of old book pages with fine drawings and covering silver foil both remind the viewer of the scientific curiosity and utopias of the past centuries. They awake the desire to start for unknown places and to explore undiscovered regions, raise the interest in the visible and the hidden. With great artistic freedom, also David Eager Maher creates mysterious, surrealistic and exoticly appearing image spaces that entangle interior and exterior as well as nature and craft, form and colour.

By reusing materials the artists generate new contents without erasing the already existing. In this way, the material itself draws the attention of the beholder. Turned book pages, insides of record sleeves, overlapping images and copies provoke and tempt to figure out what is withhold from the view. However, a disclosure would mean to disenchant the illusion and to destroy the image space.

With all three artistic positions, the formal tension resulting from the encounter of different pictorial elements expressively finds its individual counterpart in content. Precise representationalism and contrasting abstraction can reveal specific local references as well as lead the imagination to yearning indetermination. Finally, every view results in breaking with visual experiences and diving into a pictorial world that invites to an expedition into the unknown and to discover the foreign and that – by taking up the past once again – confronts us with our own present anew. 

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Portfolios of the shown works: