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As a photographer, Rudi Molacek, born in Styria, living in New York, the Burgenland in Austria, in Vienna and currently in Berlin, has experienced the picture as a technical dispositiv and, in his dealings with it, has learnt not only the principles of composition but also above all the picture's dependence on technology and the associated aesthetics of serial generation. When changing from photography to painting, at the beginning, in a controversial approach to photography, he sought a classic genre of painting, namely depiction of flowers with the rose as a preferred motif. This subject later also became the focus of his sculptural approach, as coloured aluminium sculpture, conceived for outdoor nature. He started to interpret painting and the panel painting as technical dispositives and experimented with the carrier media, be they oil paintings, photo strips, computer images, silk-screen prints or video.
The latest works developed for his large personal exhibition at the Neue Galerie offer a thrilling insight into his astounding ability to experiment with various materials as technical carrier media. This is also true for the way he deals with the picture space, which is not only to be understood as a physical space but also as extending into the ambience. The beholder losing the safe distance from the picture finds himself caught in an immersive image environment, similar to fascinating historical panorama views, or finds himself somehow reconnected with Claude Monet's hypnotic water lily paintings from Giverny.
Christa Steinle
