Gugging, Klosterneuburg, Vienna, Austria, Greece, Hawaii and Eternity’s-End-Land. The exhibition “fantastic places.!” unites works by four Gugging artists. In very different ways, they have all turned their attention to places that are familiar or unfamiliar to us.

In August Walla’s diverse visual oeuvre we find real places as well as fictive ones, such as Eternity’s-End-Land. His photographs offer a view inside the places he lived and worked, which always simultaneously provided a stage for his artistic presentation. These works are paired with the small-format pieces of Leopold Strobl, who invests his landscapes with a mysterious character by using a pencil to blot out any living beings found in the newspaper photos on which his works are based. He envelops these images in a mysterious, blue-green haze. Leonhard Fink uses pencils to draw his expansive maps, which feature countries, regions and cities. The highly detailed information they provide about architecture, infrastructure and landscapes is what makes them compelling. Karl Vondal’s erotic drawings and collages carry viewers off into the sites of his dreams and desires. Thus, for example, we find countless images of fantastic and paradisiacal places, where Karl Vondal and his lovers sit in the midst of palms and white beaches.

Curated by: Nina Ansperger