Alfredo Barsuglia

Biography

Alfredo Barsuglia was born in Graz in 1980 and has received numerous awards including the Monsignor Otto Mauer Prize, the Art Promotion Prize of the City of Vienna and the Theodor Körner Prize. The MAK Schindler Fellowship granted him a stay in Los Angeles in 2006, followed by further fellowships such as the State Fellowship for Fine Arts and most recently a working fellowship as part of the Art Promotion Award of the Province of Styria in 2021.
His works have been shown in Austria at the Kunsthaus Graz, the Kunstforum Vienna, the MMKK Museum of Modern Arts Kärnten in Klagenfurt, the Neue Galerie and Universalmuseum Joanneum in Graz, the MAK - Museum for Applied Arts, the mumok and the Museum der Modernen Kunst Stiftung Ludwig. He has been exhibited abroad in Tallinn, Luxembourg, Los Angeles, Rome and Moscow. Numerous museums such as the Leopold Museum, the MAK - Museum of Applied Arts, the Wien Museum, the Lentos and the Oberösterreichische Landesmuseum in Linz, the Neue Galerie in Graz, the Vorarlberg Museum in Bregenz and the Museum Liaunig in Neuhaus own works by Alfredo Barsuglia.
Since 2007, he has regularly designed sets and costumes for the Tanzquartier and the brut in Vienna, among others. Barsuglia explores social values such as boundaries and transitions between public and private in numerous installations such as "Social Pool" in the Mojave Desert, "Mariainsel" in Fürstenfeld and "Abriss" in Graz.
In the fall of 2022 he will begin teaching at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna together with Jakob Lena Knebl. The artist lives and works in Vienna.

In his hyperrealistic paintings and works on paper, Alfredo Barsuglia consciously explores the power of deception. His images of plants, fruits, and foods - such as the cracked egg - are masterfully recreated, staged natural scenes. Set in front of elaborately chalked-ground, a neutral background in a non-space, a "confusion game between appearance and reality"¹ unfolds. The viewer is encouraged to question their own "desires, ideals of beauty and moral concepts. At the same time, Barsuglia puts our supposed knowledge of reality to the test. What is real, what is deception? A topic that concerns us more than ever in today's world, in which media brings reality into question while more and more people immerse themselves in simulated realities."
Alfredo Barsuglia makes no distinction between reality and fiction; his works are surreal associative spaces, places of fluid transition. "Through extreme precision of the image and a questioning elaboration of cultural and natural phenomena, reality becomes an oscillating hyperreality."³ Through the exaggeration of the visible, productive frictions between reality spheres emerge and the core artistic question suggests itself: "Are we perhaps already living in a projection of reality?"⁴

¹https://www.museum-joanneum.at/kioer/projekte/permanente-projekte/events/event/8401/alfredo-barsuglia (accessed 6/21/2022).
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⁴Elon Musk at: www.focus.de/wissen/mensch/wie-bei-sims-die-erde-als-computerspiel-leben-wir-in-einer-simulierten-welt_id_9653051.html (accessed 6/21/2022).