Olaf Winkler

studied architecture in Aachen (D) and Vienna (AT). He works as freelance author, architecture journalist, architecture guide and free artist.

With a background in architecture, early artistic works were conceptual as well as architectural in topics and means, often exploring spatial or more abstract relations of coexistence through models, texts and sketches. At a certain point, painting was added as a means within the framework of a specific topic, e.g. the relationship between “I” and the aesthetic construct of “landscape”, and to what extent the former constitutes part of the latter, which includes categorical questions.

Next to works in text and other media, a main part of recent works are either collage paintings in medium to large formats or smaller works which balance between painting and drawing.

The collage paintings mostly evolve from carefully selected magazine pages that have been glued to each other (or torn apart) and that were painted over or overdrawn during and / or after assembly. A conditionally modular system emerges as a painting surface on which existing photographs, to a certain extent images trouvés, text fragments and painterly settings are superimposed. The resulting images are neither abstract nor figurative.

Lately, smaller works have condensed certain “systematics” of these bigger collages and, leaving out the collage aspect, transferred them onto more intimate formats. Notions of drawing, the line, memory, realism and the re-integration of architectural as well as physical aspects into these works are some of the topics discussed in the interview by Bas van den Hout and Eitan Efrat as part of the Radio Level Five interview series: https://soundcloud.com/level-five-317834269/radio-level-five-in-conversation-with-olaf-winkler

Contact Olaf Winkler 0049 (0)178 9884409 0032 (0)496 115800 olaf_winkler@freenet.de