Alois Mosbacher

Ropes, balls, cacti, tents, backpacks, a ladder – all unremarkable objects, but in Alois Mosbacher’s work, they become snapshots of highly private and perceptive experiences of nature. Enigmatic images of nature emerge, full of chance encounters and paradoxical interactions between objects that, at first glance, seem very out of place in the landscape. Since the 1980s, Mosbacher has expanded his pictorial world of plants and animals to include a variety of subjects and forms, developing his own artistic language that cleverly internalizes art historical influences and current trends without explicitly citing them. While Mosbacher's landscapes, still lifes, and figurative compositions are open to multiple interpretations, they resist both formalist and symbolist explanations. Although the works reduce the representational, they are not abstract—they are too based in materiality, too concrete, too close to the formal quality of individual object templates for that. In the forest of intertwined objects, knotted lines, and erratic constructions, the artist succeeds in giving even the most banal things an autonomous identity. Perception goes beyond what is represented.

Alois Mosbacher, *1954 in Strallegg (Steiermark), lebt und arbeitet in Niederösterreich.