Walter Vopava Austria, b. 1948

Walter Vopava's works are understood as an accumulation of pigments, the juxtaposition of light and dark - as a battle of light that pushes through the darkness of the paint and thus seems to make the pictures glow, as it were.
His art negates any reference to nature, no imagination is supposed to arise when looking at his works, no titling provides a path. The pictures are what they are: pure self-reflexive painting. This possibility of sensually sensitive abstraction has a tradition in painting. Even if the first non-objective works in art history were unmistakably abstracted from the object perceived in nature, it was later mainly the Abstract Expressionists - Franz Kline comes to mind - who created paintings that vibrated with powerful brushstrokes in the sense of grand gesture rather than naturalistic pathos. Vopava's canvases make do with a small palette of colours. Black and white as antipoles and in between the nuances of green, pink and grey. While the works of the 90s were still characterised by an earthy colourfulness, the current works are often light structures. The white pushes into the foreground, the colour pigments used seem like veils and give a depth that makes these paintings so exciting. The viewer can literally immerse his senses in a painting that no longer allows a fixed point. Vopava's pictures "happen" everywhere. Be it the dark, almost black bar, or the almost inconspicuous light pink tone.