Author: mancuso5

Caroline Heider studied camera and image technologies at the Vienna Film Academy as well as photography at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.

The focus of Heider’s work is on the exploration of technical images, their effects, the conditions of their production, gender aspects, and the transfer of analogue photography technologies to the digital realm. She researches and teaches at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where she is a senior lecturer in the Department of Applied Photography and Time-Based Media. Her work has been exhibited at Museum Moderne Salzburg, at Belvedere in Vienna, and at Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Caroline Heider has received the 32nd Austrian Graphic Award as well as the Outstanding Artist Award from the Austrian ministry of culture. Her artworks are part of both private and public collections.

The artist currently lives and works in Vienna, Austria. 

Interdisciplinary artist Cameron Platter’s vivid mixed-media works explore notions of excess and consumption through the lens of a South African identity.

Across drawing, sculpture, painting, and video, the artist’s extensive and diverse oeuvre is characterized by vibrant colours which evoke a playful feeling. His work can be described as provocative yet universally relatable, touching on themes such as sex, beauty, politics, and violence.

The artist often incorporates found objects in his work—including advertisements, posters, or empty energy drink containers—to convey notions about popular culture in South Africa and the rest of the world. Platter furthermore has an extensive number of paintings and other works that were created in collaboration with other artists, featuring materials such as ceramics and solid waste.

Cameron Platter’s work was featured in a monumental exhibition at the 55th Venice Biennale called “Imaginary Fact: Contemporary South African Art and the Archive.” His work also appears in the permanent collection of MoMA, New York; The FRAC des Pays de la Loire, France; Zietz MOCAA Collection; The Margulies Collection; and the Iziko South African National Gallery.

The artist currently lives and works in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.

Brian McKee was born in 1977 in Excelsior Springs, Missouri. He attended the Interlochen Arts Academy and Bard College where he studied photography with Stephen Shore, Larry Fink and Barbara Ess and wrote under John Ashbery.

McKee focused on visualising a body of work that explored both the current and past social and political atmospheres of countries around the world. He called himself “a visual historian” who ventured to “convey a unique and important view of select aspects of World History” with his photographs.

Photographing with an 8×10 inch Deardorff plate camera he composed poetic images, which conveyed a complex untold narrative. He was fond of ”the idea that houses, buildings, towns and cities provide us with a true understanding of the cultures that inhabited those spaces.”

His signature subject of the rise and fall first took shape in 1999 when he photographed Soviet military bases in former Eastern Germany. Since that project, the artist built his work around the idea that chaos is something that is never planned within a society, but is nevertheless inevitable. McKee’s last fifteen years of work attempts to ask the question, “How close are we with respect to the fine line that separates order from disorder.” Perhaps more important is the question of how and when do we know that we have crossed this invisible line.

Robert Voigts grew up in the western suburbs of Chicago. From an early age he knew he wanted to pursue art. Mostly self-taught, he now works in acrylic and collage as well as digital media. In 1986, he launched Wordsworth Design, a graphic design business.

Voigts’ personal study of art history and his journey of experimentation in collage and assemblage have shaped his work over time. The landscapes of Illinois and Missouri and the surrealist poets, especially Robert Desnos have also had a significant impacted on his practice. 

When beginning a piece, Voigts doesn’t have a fixed idea in mind, but instead, he follows an intuitive process. Using old recycled sketches, photography (both his own photos and found photography), found art, paper, packaging, and trash, he experiments with colour, shape, line and texture. The artist plays with ideas of chance, opposites, mundaneness, memory, wonder, contradiction, and juxtaposition, making use of poems, letters, numbers, punctuation, and more. After an extensive process of experimentation, he contemplates what emerged, considers if it is done and if it is, names it.

Bob Voigts is particularly fond of artists such as Joseph Cornell, Kurt Schwitters, Wayne Thiebaud, and Richard Diebenkorn. He currently lives and works in Illinois, USA.

Asgar / Gabriel is the moniker of artist duo Daryoush Asgar, born in 1975 in Tehran, and Elisabeth Gabriel, born in 1975 in Vienna. The two artists have been working together on the conceptualization and execution of their paintings since 2005. Their entire oeuvre is thus a collaborative project in the truest sense of the word.

Everything that is visible on the canvas is painted. What at first may be perceived as traces of graffiti is actually created with a brush and showcases their characteristic painterly handwriting.

Central to their work is the concept of metamorphosis. Asgar / Gabriel merge people with their favorite objects, creating a symbiosis that goes beyond our time and reality. For their work, the artists draw on literature and other forms of artistic expression.