Group exhibition together with Hannes Böck and Kerstin von Gabain
Curator: Edelbert Köb
Guido Kucsko has developed a highly independent and one-of-a-kind work. Technically and to a certain degree also stylistically, it relies on the interplay between several factors: pictures shot with a Leica camera, their subsequent digital finishing, and their being printed on Hahnemühle fine art paper on a 12-colour pigment inkjet printer. The outcome – subtle tone and colour values and precious, seemingly immaterial surfaces – is striking in its aesthetic purity. By contrast, this goes hand in hand with a substantial analysis of complex pictorial themes. Within the work process, photography mostly takes on the role of a primary impetus, the trigger of chains of associations and ramified trains of thought. Only very rarely does a picture result directly from the image shot with the camera. The final pictures – mostly series or pictorial narratives in the form of installations – only take shape after Kucsko has entered into an intensive dialogue with the sculptural objects: for him, a “Diana with Dog” from the middle of the seventeenth century gives rise to think not only about the beauty in nature and the beauty in art, but also about how the gaze is guided and constructed in the relationship between image and beholder. The Baroque Janus-faced bust “Sorrow and Dismay” inspires the artist to a renewed metaphorical and dramatic elevation of the theme within a spatial network of relations, with the sculpture now placed in the focus.
Edelbert Köb