The Mark Moore Gallery is proud to present the first West Coast exhibition of Austrian artist, Christoph Schmidberger. A graduate of the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna, the artist has had recent exhibitions of his paintings at the Landesmuseum Joanneum, and Collection ESSEL in Graz, Projektraum Viktor Bucher in Wein, and the Dubrow International at the Roger Smith Gallery in New York.
Schmidbergers’s paintings are slick, informed Pop imagery depicting youth culture in all its excessive forms: lust, boredom, drama, erotic, narcissistic, and ravishing beauty. It is the use of beauty that is the artist’s curve ball; the precision in his use of drawing and painting, creating surfaces that are immaculate and jewel like, shimmering with the imagery of his peers. What appears to be as ordinary as the snap shot composition becomes a hyper-colored paradise of youth, simultaneously exalted and toxic. It is poison perfection, a kind of carnal, cinematic portraiture.
It is the decoration of the ordinary that separates Schmidberger’s art from commercial advertising, his sly and subversive manipulation of the obvious. His subjects are often depicted in familiar fashion model poses, as actors in a fluorescent utopia, lacking any symbology. His imagery is unapologetic; moments in a super reality, perfection built by glamorous glue. Schmidberger is perhaps dreaming the vanities of youth, and simultaneously, a perverse vision of contemporary life.