Sitename

Beate Sprenger

PLAYING WITH EROTICISM AND INNER ABYSSES

Michael Vonbank's artistic universe shows a thoroughly sexualised world. In his works, the differences between the sexes become blurred, even the demarcation between humans and animals is no longer so easy to make out. This is also not essential in Vonbank's universe. What is essential is gender in itself. "Like a conundrum, male bodies present themselves with female breasts, a face dissolves into the lascivious contours of female nudes. Obscene tongues press like labia out of contracted mouths," is how Peter Gorsen (1) describes scenes from Vonbank's pictorial oeuvre.

In his drawings and his painting, Vonbank presents us with the pairing of fantasy beings that undergo all kinds of metamorphoses. For him, sexuality and eroticism are synonymous with "primal reason". Template-like animals and humans enter into a relationship with each other, merge and transform. His invented creatures, he called them "the flip side of my being" are fantasy creations, partly grotesques, partly bizarre, fairytale-like inventions. Vonbank's figures are hybrid beings, players of the erotic and the human abyss, exploring the primordial depths of human existence in ongoing metamorphoses.

"Michael Vonbank's large-format and colour-intensive paintings resemble psychogrammatic conundrums. They are visions of inner perceptions, states and sensitivities that coagulate into intense figurative narratives and imagine the self as the other. The pictures gain a sometimes irritating cheerfulness through their colourfulness, which is further dynamised by the erotic-sexual desires of individual characters and tells of fabulous dreams," is how Carl Aigner describes Vonbank's visual work.2 Gender and playfulness, the playful transformation of the figures are central themes that run through Michael Vonbank's entire oeuvre.

Vonbank plays: With abysses, with existential questions and with himself

Some of the painted figures seem to be taken from wildly fantastic animated films of the 1960s, in which all kinds of forms come to life and real beings mutate into oversized children's toys. Michael Vonbank plays. With words, images, themes and with himself. His art is play. In his art, he playfully dives into inner abysses, circles around existential themes, sometimes takes his pictures to the extreme in terms of colour and thus draws the viewer under his spell, into the depths of existential questions. By dealing with the themes, he playfully distances himself from them at the same time, the depicted metamorphoses of the inner abysses thus becoming a caricature: a self-objectification that makes the self-deprecating view, the "laughing at oneself" possible in the first place.

1 Gorsen, Peter: Malerei als magische Bewaeltigung der Umwelt, in: "Michael Vonbank. Gegenwelten - Eine Zusammenkunft. Arbeiten 2002 - 2008", Bucher Verlag, Hohenems, 2008
2 Carl Aigner in the opening speech of the exhibition by Michael Vonbank "Affen im Fischernetz" (Monkeys in a Fishing Net) curated by Christian Ludwig Attersee at the Galerie Stadtbild, 2003.

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