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until 20.08. | #3076ARTatBerlin | Crone Berlin presents from 26th June 2021 the solo exhibition The Ecstatic Static by the Austrian artist Robert Muntean.
On display are 22 mostly large-format paintings in which the artist undertakes a condensation of his previous works where the body is understood as as an outer shell or cipher of emotion.
Muntean was born in 1982 in Leoben, Austria, and has lived in Berlin since 2008. Since his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and Leipzig, he has developed an idiosyncratic painterly style that oscillates between abstraction and figuration. At first glance, both his canvas and paper works give the impression of purely abstract, gestural painting. Only on closer inspection, however, does one discover figurative elements underneath, which are mostly bodies and people, and are often taken from photographs of pop stars or cult figures.
In Muntean’s new exhibition The Ecstatic Static, the figures themselves now come to the fore for the first time. They become the defining, immediately recognizable element of the paintings. The abstract, gestural painting style is still visible, but now serves to outline the figures of the bodies and bring them to the fore. Their posture—their being bent, their standing upright, their squirming—becomes the essential means of expression in which emotion, fear, hope, confidence, or doubt are reflected.
On the one hand, Muntean thus understands the body and the figure as a metaphor for inner states; on the other hand, his painting quietly follows a second impulse: to bring order into chaos, and chaos into order. In this, he refers to the French author Raymond Roussel, who stated in his novel Locus Solus (1914) that meaning is not fixed, but always strives for variability. This insight evokes Muntean’s deconstructive painting technique, which dissolves supposedly fixed pictorial content in the act of gestural exaltation—even when a figure is thereby fixed. What appears static is fed by ecstasy within her, the Ecstatic Static, the essence of the Muntean figure.
Vernissage: Friday, 25 June 2021, 3:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
Exhibition dates: Saturday, 26 June to Friday, 20 August 2021
To the Gallery
Image caption: Robert Muntean, Courtesy Galerie Crone Berlin
Exhibition Robert Muntean – Crone Berlin | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
