In his first exhibition at the bechter kastowsky gallery, entitled ‘nothing is revealed’, Philip Patkowitsch references Bob Dylan's ‘The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest’ and thus provides insights into a working process that interlinks several artistic media.
He combines drawing and print with his wall-filling screen print series, not only to experiment with different ways of presenting drawing, but also to explore the fine line between foreground and background in the perception of his colour space.
Portraits that have been removed from their original context and translated into detailed drawings, some fragmented, some reassembled, occupy the substructure of flat, multi-coloured screen-printed walls and ultimately combine to form a flickering, painterly-drawing collage. The fact that the artist, who received the STRABAG Art Award in 2013, is not only concerned with a certain emancipation of drawing is demonstrated by his three-part work ‘grid’, which juxtaposes a black and white ink drawing with two coloured screen prints. The drawing shows two portraits, which he places mirrored on top of each other on a vertical axis, giving the penetrating gaze of four eyes a disconcerting appearance. In a next step, Patkowitsch succeeds in adding unexpected dimensions to the drawing by using the CMYK printing colour scheme - an abstraction in the form of immediate colour contrasts, which is almost completely non-representational and questions our habits of seeing and perceiving.
‘nothing is revealed’ thus summarises works by an artist whose style does not attempt to draw final conclusions, but rather provides momentary insights into the working process. A working process whose medial entanglement does not displace the classical artistic media, but rather affirmatively mixes with them and ensures a new field of tension between mutually stimulating languages.
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Philip Patkowitsch