Michael Goldgruber



Text: Alexander Viscio
I like to travel. I find it a reasonable way to challenge my “OK impress me” and “take my breath away” wish fulfillment. Of course I’m
seldom held in rapture by expansive vistas and deep set panoramas. To tell you the truth I’d much prefer to fall from a plane into a
canyon rather than contemplate and take in at a distance, the view some municipal architect’s design had regulated for me and my fellow
thrill seekers who are simply not quite ready to get back on the bus. I always find myself observing other peoples’ reactions to the
location and surroundings and spy out how they navigate towards the most perfect vantage point
in which one can see it all.

What strikes me most by Goldie’s work is he somehow participates in a non discursive yet agreed opinion with me of course, that in the
stillness of the gaze their lies an infinite quality of isolation. His canvases stretch out its subject matter in a seemingly formatted
efficiency that flattens out the otherwise spacious caverns he visits. His target though rises out of this flatness to take on human form
and occupy the emptiness of ones own expectations.

The photographs which are in some cases the source material for the paintings take on a more targeted aim, where the structures
designed and built to facilitate “the wonder of it all” are somehow appropriated to take on a rather Demonic presence as if to serve more
as relicts of a hangman’s’ galley or guillotine in yet another mid evil region perched on the outskirts of what was once inaccessible
terrain modified for tourist consumption.

I mean, what are we waiting for, when do we stop looking and how do we know we’ve acquired what we set out for. These are
existential questions that somehow are addressed quite poignantly in Goldie’s’ simplistic yet sumptuous black and white flash card like
paintings that try to warn us about the space between what is there and what we want to see.
michael@goldgruber.at
www.goldgruber.at




                                                                                                                








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Featured Arts Writer, Alexander
Viscio, brings readers a special
look at artist, Michael Goldgruber
Platform, 2007, Oil on Linen, 150 x 200cm.
Teotihuacán, 2007,
oil/linen, 140x400 cm
View point, 2007, Oil on linen, 60 x 90cm.
Mirador, 2008, Oil on linen, 140 x 200cm.
Viewpoint, 2007, oil/linen, 60x90cm
Teotihuacán, 2008, oil/linen, 100x150 cm
Platform, 2006, oil/linen, 120x160 cm
Buena Vista, 2008, oil/linen,
diptych, 140x410 cm
Vista Panoramica, 2005, oil/linen,
140x400cm, diptych
Platform, 2006, oil/linen, 120x160 cm
Teotihuacán, 2007, oil/linen, 130x190 cm
Buena Vista, 2008, oil/linen,
diptych, 140x410 cm
The New York Optimist
January 2009