Clemens Stecher, Some Like it Nice, 1999
 
 
Clemens Stecher generally culls snapshots, drawings, his own textual sketches and stray material such as newspaper articles and photographs from printed matter and combines them to form collages. This allows him, amongst other things, to create diaries that stretch over a long period of time and photo collections that give fragmentary glimpses of "everyday culture" as well as biographical moments from Clemens Stecher's life.
 
"What is significant about my collages is the correlation and contrast of different visual and textual elements, as well as the throwing together, the combination of different parts that were not together is this form before. They in turn form serial facets of a line where I try to authentically document the time that I spend here. I mix my own texts with other people's, poems and above all quotations from advertising and this results in a sort of continuous monologue, a stream of consciousness" (Clemens Stecher)
 
 

Clemens Stecher, Nothing Feels Like, 1999
 
 
In an interview with Wolfgang Zinggl, Clemens Stecher thought that he "wanted to return to his picture-text-combinations what is still to be had in some documentary films, "namely"a direct, mediation without any effects or illusion (...) because I tend to treat different "traces" in parallel form and so am able to supply the most diverse associations (that can partially conform to those of the viewer), a sense of delusion emerges. (Strictly speaking, the "reality illustrated" corresponds to that of a psychosis)".
 


Clemens Stecher, Porno, 1999
 
 
By using but, nevertheless, clearly disassociating himself from the aesthetic of fashion and advertising (which always fall back on formal elements of the fine arts), Clemens Stecher's work represents an artistic attack on the different levels of reality, as these are represented amongst other things in medially distributed pictures and texts. Not just the fragmentation, fractures, omissions and combinations of the selected pictorial and textual content play a significant role here, but above all the their processing with paint, drawing, Microsoft word or hand-written comments and not least his involvement with the medium of painting.
 

PUBLICATION

The exhibition is complimented by a catalogue with an essay by Hedwig Saxenhuber, a dialog with Wolfgang Zinggl and Clemens Stecher, alongside extensive pictorial material. The catalogue will be published in German and English.
 

CLEMENS STECHER 24 pages, 9 colored illustrations, 1 b/w illustration Secession 1999 ___________________ available in the shop

 

Clemens Stecher was born in 1968 and lives and works in Vienna.   Numerous one-man-shows and group exhibitions (selection): "Under Thirty", Galerie Metropol, Vienna (1992); "Eine freie Akademie auf Zeit", Kunstverein München (1994); "Körpernah", Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna (1994); "Skizze, Modelle, Notizen", Raum Aktueller Kunst, Vienna (1995); "Zeitschnitt 96", Kunstraum Innsbruck (1996); "Junge Szene '96", Secession, Vienna (1996); Brasilica, Vienna (1996); "Pictures of Lily", 30 Underwood St. Gallery, London (1997); "Open a Gallery", T19 Galerie, Vienna (1998); "Null", Bernsteiner family house, Vienna (1999).
 

 

ROMAN SIGNER   UDO WID

EXHIBITION PROGRAM 1999

For further information and photographic material please contact:
 
Tamara Schwarzmayr
Secession, Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession
Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Vienna
Tel: +43-1-5875307-21, Fax: +43-1-5875307-34
presse@secession.at