Klaus Obermaier (AT)
Vernissage: FRT September 5, 2014, 7:30 PM, Champagne breakfast: SAT September 6, 2014, 11 AM (open until 4 PM)
Art society PARADIGMA, Landstraße 79/81, 4020 Linz
Free entrance
Art society PARADIGMA Linz presents three different works of the Linz born artist Klaus Obermaier that have one thing in common: the change of our perception by interventions in the depiction of seemingly everyday scenes and familiar motifs.
Our perception is based on pattern recognition. Here we distinguish between two theories: the template theories assume that perceived objects are compared with objects stored in the long-term memory. In contrast, the feature theories are based on the assumption that perceived objects are analyzed and then identified by means of their “components”.
With his portraits of artists, Obermaier literally turns upside down the template approach and urges us to use additional analysis through our cognitive system. We can still identify each of the persons by their characteristics, but their facial features get a certain distance and strangeness that we know from looking in the face of an animal.
The secondary sexual characteristics exposed in the installation “BB” lose their sexual connotation due to their representation in excessive size and the repeal of the laws of physics. Thus, they transmute to virtual kinetic objects in our perception.
Obermaier’s urban landscapes do not show a depiction of a city, but instead a condensate of its appearances and realities.