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Margareta Sandhofer
MICHAEL VONBANK: THE PAINTER AS DRAMATIST
From sudden inspiration to orchestrated drama on a large scale
Michael Vonbank's painting is unusual, strikingly resistant in its idiosyncrasy and highly subjectivised. Borrowings from art history or inspirations from contemporary art cannot be detected; any similarities cannot be argued with a direct or indirect influence from outside. Michael Vonbank's work reveals an impressive originality in both the literary and the painterly, which bursts out of him explosively and manifests itself both literarily and painterly - and he allows it to happen unhindered, surrenders empathetically to the involuntary inspiration and finally celebrates it with joyful abandon. A sudden idea belongs immediately jotted down, in the pub on napkins, in the studio also directly on the walls, which are ultimately completely covered with his writing: Biographical notes, spontaneous ideas and thoughts, aphorisms and poems overlap. Some of the furniture, all the windows and the entrance doors are covered with copious amounts of paint. Today, one is overwhelmed by this testimony to his overflowing creative urge.
Just as involuntarily, one can imagine his approach to painting. Michael Vonbank does not work according to calculation or theoretical concept - fascinating in view of the fact that he had previously completed the first part of a law degree. While devoting himself to this absolutely rational métier until 1986, he first created self-taught, memorable pencil drawings; he produced fantastic creatures, human and animal intertwined forms with dense strokes and hatching; later he let them shine powerfully and garishly in oil pastel drawings with black-edged, flat and unbroken colour application. While studying painting with Ludwig Attersee at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna (1991-1995), he switched to oil painting and, after completing his studies, finally to acrylic painting.
In his oil paintings, he explores a rich palette of mixed colours in nuanced shades that emphasise the volume of the depicted bodies and structure the surfaces. Ambiguous narratives spread out in multiform scenarios and occupy large formats as orchestrated dramas. After graduating, Michael Vonbank pushed back this elaborate, dazzling variety of colour tones in favour of an unmixed application of paint in acrylic. However, the garish colourfulness of his early oil pastel works, which was held in place by thick black framing lines, was replaced by succinctly placed colour compositions. After a phase of exclusive concentration on the clearly reduced triad of black, white and grey, his own formal vocabulary has also been explored and finds clearer articulations.
Unconcerned with artistic tradition and any canon, Michael Vonbank successively concentrates the striking essence of his painting and deepens it. From this he develops an essence that continues to constantly elude any inscription in an external art context, but rather is increasingly committed solely to its own intensified regularity. Unchanged intuitively, spontaneously and impulsively, his painting appears freely and autonomously in its bizarre poetry with clearly developed complexity and radically plays out its autonomous potential in increased form.
"Human, animal, demon - the reverse side of my being" - snapshots of an inner transformation
Michael Vonbank's painting resembles a theatrical outlandish production that leads the viewer to encounter wondrous figures. Stencilled animals and humans, fragmented and distorted figures, also partly animal and partly human, format themselves into fantastic figurations. These beings are overdrawn, mirrored and repeated by Michael Vonbank, presented in an intricate existence as ambiguous creatures, as metamorphoses, chimeras or grotesques. Fiercely moved and abysmally animated, these strange creatures are entangled in their whimsical narratives - and with a demonic gaze they involve the viewers in this story and draw them under their spell.
These unreal beings and faces are not allegories or portraits, not even allusions to real people. They are representatives of human existence, alone as well as in the context of our world, ambivalent states of mind whose insides are visibly turned inside out.
And yet, sly irony and subversive humour seep through the irritating and often obsessively dismissive facial expressions and gestures, heightening the dichotomy even further. Above all, these suggestive paintings are imbued with a passionate joy and irrepressible anarchic delight in the excess of painting, in the dynamism of colour, in the madness of form and representation - a great excitement that immediately jumps out at the viewer. The driving force behind Michael Vonbank's exuberant creativity may well have been his own emotional excitement, which is directly reflected in his literary and pictorial work, and which he intuitively transfers to the canvas in colours and forms with a radical directness. And it is precisely in this that he reveals a causal vulnerability that touches behind the scenes, subtly confronts the garish poses and keeps the work in a sensitive balance.
Michael Vonbank's painting reflects his own inner self, of course, but not only exclusively. It is the scene of an ambivalence that first takes place within his state of mind, but from which it spills over and constitutes itself as a principally possible human constitution: in a multiformity and complexity that remains inscrutable and enigmatic even for him.
Insightful reference to this provisional hypothesis can be found in his speech (unfortunately no longer preserved in its wording) for his diploma at the University of Applied Arts, in which he describes the connection "Man, animal, demon - the reverse side of my being" as the fundamental theme of his diploma thesis (for which he was to receive the prize of the Province of Tyrol). In his speech he let his thoughts revolve around ongoing transformations and inner processes, he felt himself as a stage, as a place of events, at the same time as a performer, participant and at the same time spectator, he saw himself in the middle of this play or he understood himself as the play.
"Goblins & Lucky Charms" - Actors of a painting staged in space
Michael Vonbank's great painterly dramas, such as "In Free Fall" from 1994, already feature ambiguous monsters and ghosts, whose horror he undermines by making the creatures appear clumsy and almost comical, so that the cute little animals inspire empathy in the viewer. In 2005 he decides to present his creatures freely in space. He had his sketches of the mythical creatures transferred to metal plates on a larger scale and cut them out to paint them on both sides. Michael Vonbank creates 25 mixed creatures, animal-like creatures with more or less pronounced human features. In some, two different beings seem to have merged into one chimera, reminiscent of ancient myths, fairy tales, fables or other unreal stories. Possible contradictions are suspended in the painterly treatment or unfold precisely in it. The moving brushstrokes are set with a free and generous gesture, yet with certainty. In the interplay of forms and colour tones within the contours, a painterly quality develops that fills the silhouette with idiosyncratic and resistant life, sometimes seems to want to burst the outer form and gives it a differentiated character and activity. The ductus and the colourful power sparkle with energy and emotion and often give the reverse side of the individual figure a different or opposite expression. In their ambivalence, the object-like structures can be exemplary for Michael Vonbank's painting (or for his artistic work in general) and symbolic for his personal being: On the one hand, one encounters a joyful lightness, on the other a profound seriousness. A jolly Punch appears on its reverse side of precocious haughtiness; the figure "My best friend" (which may conceal a self-portrait) presents itself on the one hand as jolly and relaxed, but on the reverse side, rolling its eyes, tips over into an opposite state of mind.
From 2006, Michael Vonbank exhibits his series "Kobolds & Lucky Charms" leaning against the wall on the floor, as if they had sprung from his paintings, which are also displayed on the walls above. Lying in wait, these creatures surround the viewing public. The animated impression is still a static one, a masquerade that is heightened and dynamised into theatricality in a later exhibition: in 2010, these creatures hang from the ceiling on barely visible nylon threads in a dense mixture, so that they can be experienced by the visitors walking in them as a direct physical counterpart and begin to swing when they are inevitably touched. The previous extras are immediately activated and mutated into protagonists, involving the visitors in their lustful play at the moment of contact. The whole scenery starts to vibrate, iridescent in its changeable appearance, fluctuating depending on the perspective and the momentary interplay. The play is sensitive and unstable, an allegorical mirror of an entangled human mind or of an individual in a world of other individuals, all of whom, including the visitors, are not clearly defined and are not meant to be so clearly defined.
Perhaps this production of "Kobolds & Lucky Charms", whose creator and director is Michael Vonbank, is a kind of visualisation of his play "The Director", written in 1986. In this one, the director is the author himself, who also takes on the role of actor and speaker, teetering between vision and self-doubt, loudly consulting his conscience, calling up various allegories as he goes along, and finally letting envy become wisdom. The play unravels its own logic, audience and actors are one, the director is not its directing sovereign, but a whirling part within it. "Our life is a play and we have to play it well" is what all the roles say in unison. Perhaps this quotation provides a fitting introduction to the ambiguous series of "Kobolds & Lucky Charms", to Michael Vonbank's painting per se, or to his self-image as an artist and human being. Ultimately, Michael Vonbank's theatrical presentation of "Kobolds & Lucky Charms" is painting stepped into space, staged and set in motion, condensed into a great spectacle that has bubbled out of him and sweeps us away into his visionary world.
This text was published in the catalog "Michael Vonbank. Demon Theatre. Works 1986 - 2015. An Overview"
Edited by Beate Sprenger with texts by Christian Ludwig Attersee, Daniela Gregori, Lucas Gehrmann, Anton Herzl,
Margareta Sandhofer, Beate Sprenger, Florian Steininger, Michael Vonbank and Vitus Weh.
Verlag fuer moderne Kunst, Wien 2022
ISBN: 978-3-9035-7269-9 |