Gerhard Kaiser: Images never end

Gerhard Kaiser, 1955 was born in Bad Vöslau and works in Enzesfeld-Lindabrunn in Lower Austria. From 1975-1980 he studied at the Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien (University of Applied Arts Vienna), master course in painting and printmaking, prof. Oswald Oberhuber. Since 1976 he has exhibited in numerous exhibitions. His works can be found in major museums and private collections, including: the Albertina Museum, Vienna, Belvedere 21, Vienna, the Liaunig Museum, Neuhaus, the State Collections of Lower Austria, the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, the Cultural Office of the City of Vienna, the South Bohemian Gallery, Budĕjovice. Peter Liaunig Collection, Vienna, Kraus Collection, Chicago, USA, Hodin Collection, London, UK, Urban Collection, Waidhofen/Ybbs, Oberhuber Collection, Vienna, Rychlik Collection, Bad Vöslau, Hummel Collection, Vienna, Brunmair Collection, Vienna, Hofians Collection, Baden.

Digital storage of images opens up a new world for Gerhard Kaiser. Everything is an image, everything is infinite and images are eternal. Before printing on plexiglass, paper and canvas in specific organizational systems, image data is compressed, overlaid, bent and edited and everything is digitally kneaded. In other words, it goes the way of adding. In the case of canvases, a painterly intervention is often added, as the painting Reused in the current exhibition shows.

In their documentary ‚The Powers of Ten‘, artist duo Charles and Ray Eames focus their lens on infinity. Narrowing the field of view leads to unrepresentative vision as well as blurring the boundaries, magnifying and reducing the size. Gerhard Kaiser works with similar processes in his digital works: he abstracts into the small and the large. The closer you get to the image and the further you move away from it, the more abstract it becomes. The artist often uses materials from his immediate surroundings. „I’m a regular hamster,“ he says. Language also plays a special role in Gerhard Kaiser’s art. Letters and lines are obscured, scattered, illegible or look like mysterious hieroglyphs. Gerhard Kaiser’s works are in many ways a play of levels, for alongside the switching between writing and image, abstraction and representation, zooming in and out, there is a further ambiguity in the works. Often one or more frames containing images appear. A picture within a picture has the function of emphasizing something, accentuating it, pointing it out. In the context of Kaiser’s works, which work with a stream of images, it appears as a way to contain the images and make them tangible, to stop the visual overload. Already Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Barbara Kruger, Gerhard Richter and many others have pointed to single media images. However, the presence of the image has changed since the beginnings of Pop Art, which dealt with this issue so intensively. It has only increased as a result of ongoing digital developments. Western companies are exposed to a constant barrage of images and have to find a way to deal with it. Gerhard Kaiser consciously deals with this flood of images and counteracts them with abstractions that develop their own visual laws.

From Nina Schedlmayer: The pictorial heartbeat: on the digital art of Gerhard Kaiser