MARC ASCHENBRENNER
Oct 27 - Nov 25

The video works by the artist Marc Achenbrenner, born in 1971 in Linz, transport the viewer into a mysterious, fantastical and sometimes rather uncanny parallel universe, loaded with complex symbolism.

The main focus is usually on the performative act itself, which is very much a physical expression of a pre-determined dramaturgy for the camera. Aschenbrenner’s film shots, the almost cinematographic composition, and the precision of the sequences, indicate an action that has been staged for the camera. In this way the authenticity of the performance is preserved, while a disconcerting intimacy is also created, despite the use of the media of film. In close-ups, and at times dramatic sequences, we are confronted with the artist or his protagonists writhing like tadpoles in a bathtub filled with algae-green primeval slime or floating weightlessly in shiny gold foil. The characters, their fetishes and masquerades, as well as the metaphorical oscillation between primeval soup and space ship or amniotic sac and hot air balloon, derive from an erotic, imaginative world, and the artist provides us with a densely composed insight into this world.

The work shown in Aschenbrenner’s first solo exhibition in the Galerie Olaf Stüber Zweite Sonne / Second Sun (2005) is also characterised by a cinematic metamorphosis. Following a traumatic birth out of the black, wet darkness, we see the light-footed artist floating upwards towards the light, like a modern Ikarus, carried only by the upward air currents. However once again the dream of being able to fly and the desire to vanish is only fleeting. The threads holding the thin-walled aircraft tear like an umbilical cord and the balloon floats up into the sky like a second sun.