Alois Mosbacher

Ropes, balls, cacti, tents, backpacks, a ladder – all unremarkable objects, but in Alois Mosbacher’s work, they become snapshots of highly private and perceptive experiences of nature. Enigmatic images of nature emerge, full of chance encounters and paradoxical interactions between objects that, at first glance, seem very out of place in the landscape.

Since the 1980s, Mosbacher has expanded his pictorial world of plants and animals to include a variety of subjects and forms, developing his own artistic language that cleverly internalizes art historical influences and current trends without explicitly citing them. While Mosbacher's landscapes, still lifes, and figurative compositions are open to multiple interpretations, they resist both formalist and symbolist explanations. Although the works reduce the representational, they are not abstract—they are too based in materiality, too concrete, too close to the formal quality of individual object templates for that. In the forest of intertwined objects, knotted lines, and erratic constructions, the artist succeeds in giving even the most banal things an autonomous identity. Perception goes beyond what is represented.

At the Belvedere 21, Alois Mosbacher constructs an immersive setting, in which the ordinary is celebrated through the extraordinary in coded constellations.  The exhibition does not follow a linear narrative and conventional museum fittings are largely dispensed with, resulting in a freedom of movement between the works that creates a rhythmic pictorial habitat. Tree-entwining tendrils encroach on the boundaries of the picture plane and thus provide direction, rhythm, and tempo. The exhibition invites a change of perspective and combines Mosbacher’s playful, enigmatic artistic language with his trademark humor.

Curated by Miroslav Haľák.

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