Lukas Salzmann: In the Viewer's Eye - the Unknown

(Hardback)

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As a painter, Lucas Salzmann feels bound to representationalism, producing references to art history and the media world in many of his works.

Since 1988 Salzmann has been overpainting photographic templates, such as, for instance, magazine articles, postcards and photographs, from various eras and a variety of motifs. By doing this, he liberates the images from their functional obligation, whereby they are no longer tied to their documentary character. With an intense application of paint and a vigorous style, he dissolves seemingly unequivocal content and translates it into an ambiguity that confers as much validity to the mystical as it does to the obvious.

Salzmann shows viewers how to follow their own perception, instead of simply trusting in what is shown. The concentrated atmosphere in his pictures opens up emotional spaces and leads us to a state of limbo between recognisability and the arcane, in which the transformative power of the painting unfurls its full effect.

In the Viewer's Eyes the Unknown encompasses Lukas Salzmann's work from 1995 to 2018. It includes an accompanying essay by Rudolf Velhagen, which locates the painter's work in an art-historical context.

Author Bio

Rudolf Velhagen, D.Phil., is an art historian, born in 1962. He has a Doctorate in medieval art history from Basel University. Between 1990 and 1995 he was academic assistant at Kunstmuseum Basel (Department of Prints and Drawings). Between 1995 and 2000 he was academic assistant at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and instructor at the Ecole du Louvre. Between 2000 and 2005 he was Head of the Visual Arts and Design Division at the Swiss cultural foundation Pro Helvetia in Zurich. Between 2005 and 2012 he was Director of the Sidney and Jenny Brown-Sulzer Langmatt Foundation at the Langmatt Museum in Baden. Since autumn 2012 he has been head curator of the Aargau Museum Historical Collection at Lenzburg Castle, and also head curator at the Eduard Spoerri Museum in Wettingen since 2009, and director of Galerie im Gluri Suter Huus, Wettingen since 2013.