Grabner, R: Ronald Kodritsch

Ronald Kodritsch has struck again and with masterly brushstrokes he has created a new series of works in which irony and ingenuity abound. He has adopted the most treasured motif of the amateur and Sunday painter and painted a series of floral still lifes that oscillates between kitsch and avant-garde, romanticism and abstraction, appropriation and originality. Starting as homages to flora and the history of painting, Kodritsch has made portraits and painted a new series of bastards, which he has furnished with Baroque and Victorian hairstyles analogous to the time Richard Dadd's masterpiece "The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke"was made. Bastards are not only character heads par excellence, whereby the dogs take on a substitute function for humans, they are also painted in the style of classic portraits. The baroque head of hair, the classic iconography of the bust, which evokes a long art-historical tradition, and the subject of the humanised dogs show not only a profound knowledge of art and cultural history, but also the artist's biting mockery of elitist social conventions and rituals.