Digital Sky & Flat Space

The catalog published on the occasion of the exhibition at the Lentos brings together Herwig Kempinger's works of the last two decades for the first time. The essential blocks of his photographic oeuvre are presented together with the most recent paintings, and his early Super-8 films can also be seen.

With all the effort required to produce a single picture, the effect that Herwig Kempinger achieves is strikingly irritating. What is it? How did he do that?
The images that the artist presents, mostly on large-scale panels, seem cool and yet seductive, enigmatic, magical. They are spaces of light in which the illusionist possibilities of photography are demonstrated and subverted at the same time with the help of the camera technique, color illumination and, more recently, with digital techniques. In the new watercolors Kempinger reduces his means to brush and paint, to black and white – and remains as suggestive as ever.