Nearly forty years have come and gone since New Painting turned the art world upside down. Tired and bored by the formalism and rationalism of the prevailing art trends, like Minimalism or Concept Art, young artists at the time enthusiastically picked up brush and paint again.

It was the hunger for pictures, in German “Hunger nach Bildern,” as Wolfgang Max Faust, legendary editor of Wolkenkratzer magazine, called his anthology of paintings from the eighties, that brought forth expressive-abstract, sensual-figurative, narrative-surreal and above all colourful, cheeky, large format pictures using a sweeping and bold brushstroke, a daring palette of striking colours. The emotionality, recklessness and subversion of the painting of the eighties and nineties reflects the attitude to life and the zeitgeist of a whole generation.

The exhibition “Vom Hunger nach Bildern” presents four outstanding painter positions, from Siegfried Anzinger’s fragile pictorial narratives to Otto Zitko’s graphic-painterly implosions, and from Florin Kompatscher’s wonderfully bizarre dream worlds to Éva Bodnár’s sensitive colour osmoses, which stood at the beginning of the comeback of painting and have not only influenced the development of painting to this day, but with their singularity and steadfastness have proven, in impressive fashion, the incredible potential of painting. Gerald Matt