ANSELM GLÜCK 2020

In a large solo show, Galerie Kovacek & Zetter presents new works by anselm glück for the seventh time. The Linz-born painter and poet lives and works in Vienna, and his works can be found in numerous museums and private collections.

anselm glück's paintings are about us humans in a restless, hectic, but also colourful, imaginative and mysterious world, and they are also always a little bit about the artist himself, who appears here as a placeholder or one among many. "fast wär's ich nicht" - the title of the exhibition - refers to this: is it him or yet again not, who one encounters in the pictures, but in the end it is we ourselves who are confronted here in a colourful panopticon. glück includes us in his cosmos, in which one encounters oneself, seemingly by chance, but nevertheless agreed upon and predetermined throughout. The figures in the pictures take on certain roles or positions, are different "I's" of one and the same personality; but this too can change at any time. Second faces are worn, exchanged and removed, people recognise each other, welcome each other. Everything is a big game, masks can be exchanged, one can hide behind them, change one's personality, but everything follows a certain predetermined rhythm that determines the encounter. In the process, the future and the present blur together, the image beings find themselves in a now that is half remembered, half foreseen, formed from the interplay of history and utopia. Can the intervention of the protagonists change the pictorial world? As spontaneous as the pictorial compositions seem, the fate that the artist has placed on the lowest layer of the picture in the form of wild brushstrokes determines what happens on the surface. anselm glück places his figures in a playful dream world, he lets them - to use his own words - "drift into life without knowing who they would be, because that's where the confusion already begins".