Painting human conditions.
My friend Jasmin Schreiber was asked to recommend creative people, to be highlighted in the ZEITMagazin newsletter. Her initiative ultimately resulted in the following coverage, which you can also read in your browser.
Thanks to Christoph Amend and Johanna Palla!
Die Kentaurin von Kagran is a book that combines the poetry of Brigitte Menne with my black and white drawings — in visually striking style, envisioned and realized by Mischa Guttmann (who is both sculptor and graphic designer). The book consists of 192 pages and was published by fabrik.transit.
Brigitte’s poetry is published the first time, and covers a nearly twenty-year range. Contact me if you want to buy a copy (€18).
Update: I did over twenty individual and group coachings with artists and curators from Canada, India, the Dominican Republic, Switzerland, Russia, USA, Austria and beyond.
This initiative eventually resulted in me conceptualizing a low-budget 6-week course on art world dynamics ($100 for the entire course, called “Living the Art Life“). Here’s a video of me advertising that course.
The State of Lower Austria bought my work “Equilibrium” in 2014. The piece was part of the exhibition “Ich bin alles zugleich – Selbstdarstellung von Schiele bis heute” at Landesgalerie Niederösterreich, which ran from Mai 2019 to August 2020. During the exhibition, Jaqueline Scheiber/minusgold was commissioned to write about some of the exhibited works. Here’s her text.
A selection of works from my Waiting-series was featured in the “For The Immortal” issue of Nektr magazine.
During the Corona lockdown in 2020, Markus Greussing produced a feature titled “Waiting – A Forgotten Art” for Austria’s national television (ORF).
The idea was to feature several individuals and their thoughts on the lockdown — but with the lockdown ending quicker than expected, a ninety minute show was cut down to 10 minutes.
The cut-down feature was published on May 25th 2020, and included some of my work and thoughts:
The state of Lower Austria commissioned several artists to create a video work on their lockdown situation.
This is the work I created; it shows paintings created since the Corona lockdown began, mixed with a piano improvisation recorded on January 26, 2020.
In March 2020, art magazine Parnass featured some studio glimpses. Here’s the link to the original article — enjoy! <3
“Fame/Fake/Fail and Fear – Schwarze Melange” was a group exhibition curated by Eleni Kampuridis, which was shown at Kunsthalle Exnergasse and at Kunstraum “Die Schöne”. It included two works from my 2017 series that transformed political horrors with a transmedial pixelation/painting process.
The artists participating in the exhibition investigate, document, expose, and analyse the effects of language and image as a foundation of fine arts and PR based on the example of the 2017 Austrian election campaigns. Thanks to an ingenious PR strategy, then-chancellor candidate Sebastian Kurz could create a mood swing without any political urgency. In 2000 Christoph Schlingensief caused a stir in the framework of the Wiener Festwochen with his container action »Bitte liebt Österreich (Please Love Austria)«. A perfect staging of image and language can unleash emotions, which can be utilised either for political, marketing strategy, or artistic purposes. Hence, this exhibition is also a call to critically question information, to verify its substance, and to apply marketing tools with an apparent positive image effect more consciously—also in the field of fine arts.
Some of my works were part of this group show focusing on the topics of home, body, death and life. The exhibition showed works by Ona B., Ina Loitzl, Josef Wurm and me.
“Don’t Leave Me” was my first solo exhibition in Spain, at Reiners Contemporary in Marbella. It continued the themes started at its accompanying solo show “Kindness of Strangers” (Galerie Voss, Düsseldorf).
I’ll have my first solo at unttld contemporary/Vienna. It’s a new collaboration that only started this year, so I’m super excited about it.
Eva Kelety produced these portrait photos of me within my solo exhibition “Folds” at Bildraum 07.
Click here for details on the exhibition.
This is a show about abandonment, as witnessed by each of us everyday: in people that grow, in objects that stay — and in the folds and creases left with us along the way.
The series consists of a series of ink drawings, but the show is actually centered around a video work. It’s the first time I’m exhibition a time-based piece, and in this case it’s used to bring together my portrait and interview interests — yet blends them with generative abstraction algorithms. The software I wrote for this has been in use for my drawing practice for a long while now, and was expanded to handle video footage.
“Kindness of Strangers” was my fourth solo exhibition at Galerie Voss. It opened on June 7th 2019.
The exhibition features works created after I finished my second series of psychotherapy sessions. The pieces have the wide-ranging, meandering ambiguities known from my previous work — which are also uniquely known to those trying to interpret dreams, Freudian slips or other co-conscious actions. The exhibited paintings aim to emulate rather than depict such subconscious plots: throughout the last years, I continuously suggested psychoanalytical, and thus highly individualized readings of my works. With paintings being inherently post- and preverbal, they seemed a perfect medium for a series on ambiguities and personal interpretations.
The exhibited works repeat and permute a small set of symbols: leaves, origami objects, upside-down figures, closed eyes, roots – with verbal languages offering obvious clues to their potential meanings. The exhibition title refers to the idea of strangers: those encountered in the world, as well as those found within each of us – and the benevolence of human subconsciouses, towards each other and ourselves.
Thomas Wolfgang Kuhn wrote a text about the exhibition, which you can read here.
‘[…] Christian Bazant-Hegemark’s art is a plea for active engagement that also makes the “laissez faire” apparent. Perhaps the fusion of the digital and the analogue is a hybrid, just like the combination of external reality and inner vision, although here it appears to be fruitful and fearless.’
I’m currently hosting a six-week workshop at Veronika Dirnhofer‘s class for drawing, at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. The course aims to support artists in increasing their (art) thinking and writing skills, by discussing various forms of art writings, the general power of words and meanings as tools of consequence.
The course includes various theoretical aspects, plus loads of practical exercices aimed to empower students.
In 2019 I was asked by Alexandra Rutsch Brock to give a presentation about my path into the arts, for her students at Pelham High School/NY. I talked about how I started drawing at age 24, got into the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna two years later, wrote a PhD thesis that got me into curating, led an artist-run space, managed a startup gallery, and left curating to found the On Doubt YouTube channel.
What a ride.
Photos (c) Alexandra Rutsch Brock
In 2018 I was approached by Wizz Magazine to show some much-loved parts of Vienna. Here are some screenshots 😉
I was ranked place 30 on Trend Magazine’s “Artist Ranking” =)
This was my first solo exhibition at Hollerei Galerie (Vienna). The works depicted heavy political and societal events, to investigate how traditional painting topics operate when referencing the contemporary world of media –, and when they appropriate its formal codes.
Being unsatisfied with the possibilities of digital image editing, Bazant-Hegemark developed his own image abstraction software (enabling unusual fragmentarizations and transformations, and the calculation of a virtual third dimension from 2d images). The results are an integral part of his current image conception. Apart from these algorithmic image modifications, Bazant-Hegemark started to digitize images manually (“pixeling”), strongly referencing 1990s video game aesthetics, and resulting in the works’ surreal spin.
The exhibition focuses on works that transform iconic contemporary images in this multifold way (oftentimes depictions of suffering, morally “authorized” by media awards): photojournalistic sources get pixeled manually, abstracted algorithmically, edited in standard image editing software, printed on fabric and opened up to a traditional oil painting process. This way, the final images flirt with the surface’s alleged beauty; they are aestehtically charged, which quickly becomes unbearable considering the works’ actual depictions.
In this series, Bazant-Hegemark operates in an expanded contemporary painting mode, caring about understanding the capacity of visual media to depict and express. Today’s post-factual media lost its authenticity – having exchanged it with self-referential journalistic networks, for which images only matters as surface: as effect and commodity. There is no more relying on an image’s accuracy: in media, reality and fiction lost their distance. As a result, contemporary mimetic painting is in an unkown situation: it can create, simulate and appropriate, but can only imagine actual authenticity in depicting things happen outside of painting.
I wrote the following to document my thoughts about this work series:
My work generally blends traditional figuration with an abstraction that time and again references computer graphic stereotypes: theatrical scenes populated with interpersonal agendas, focusing a loose triple dynamic of identities, places and actions – with uncertainty being their potentially distinctive, uniting feature. To strengthen their political subtextual leanings, some pieces reference highly specific contemporary documentary photography (e.g. Uncertainty Principle depicting Lamon Reccord, or The Drizzle depicting Sergey Ponomarev’s award-winning refugee photo). The paintings care to reflect our human conditions’ ambiguities, and can be understood as fragmentary statements towards an infinite, holistic, multi-narrativistic rhizome: offering views on society and culture in general, and the layers upon layers of individual fears and hopes discoverable within.
By touching the transient nature of topics like identity, gender, memory, emotion, motivation, etc., the works focus the ever-changing undercurrents of societal contracts, as well as the vast spaces in between those clearly defined hegemonic states. Transformation, transition, transference, transgression: How does painting (for entities living within the specifics of legislature) relate to the humanistic experiences of societies based on limitations and freedoms? How do individuals operate when finding themselves in situations beyond clearly understandable dynamics of cause and effect? What consequences emerge for western minds, whose identifying agendas (studying, remembering, producing) are gradually taken over by monotheistic algorithms? The presented works are the result of a process investigating the creation of paintings; sidestepping didactics, aiming for a specific emotionality to facilitate a state defined by an equilibrium of emotion and intellect: painting as emotionally coherent space.
Ultimately, this reflects my interest in ontological, media-based inquiries regarding the state of figurative painting within postmodern canons: the state of mimetic painting strategies in general, and more specifically regarding its post-symbolist use in mapping indefinable, infinite characteristics; how a “poetics of paint” influences its mapping abilities; how painting can be made a proper tool to discuss politics and societies, when its native ability seems so much more suitable to documenting its own phenomena (drippings, flowing, splashes etc. – the physical attributes of oil paint); how abstraction is modified when the aforementioned phenomena are augmented by highly detailed figuration, or other narrative mechanics: These physical attributes make painting seem uniquely suitable to map volatile, ambiguous and indefinable characteristics.
Rainer Sigl interviewed me for my curatorial work and thoughts on videogames, on occasion of the exhibition “Viennese Videogame Aesthetics”.
Read the full article here.
In 2015 I curated a group exhibition about videogame aesthetics. Here are links to publications from various news outlets:
“Video games are gradually embraced as contemporary artistic medium, especially known for their interactivity. Uniting a variety of media like music, sound, game and level design, they often feature strong visual aesthetics. While video games are already exhibited in their native interactive form in museums worldwide, their visual aesthetics have only been shown when focussing their production art, or when used as marketing medium. Focussing static still frames of games in the context of gallery exhibitions apparently hasn’t been established.
With Vienna being home to a diverse group of video game studios (from one-person-operations up to a team of hundred people), the HOLLEREI Galerie is pleased to invite you to its upcoming autumn exhibition, “Viennese Video Game Aesthetics” – with exhibitors including Anna Prem, Blood Irony, Broken Rules, Causa Creations, Gold Extra, IMakeGames (Maximilian Csuk), Leafthief (Stefan Srb), Michael Hackl, Mi’pu’mi, Sabine Harrer, Sarah Hiebl, Philipp Seifried, Socialspiel, Josef Who & Broken Rules, Zeppelin Studio.
The show, curated by Christian Bazant-Hegemark, exhibits a selection of still frames from local video game productions, printed in museum quality in small collector’s editions (1 + 3AP). This extends the view on the medium, which usually updates its content 30-60 times per second: detached from its other medial influences, its visual aesthetics are heightened, allowing for specific in-game moments to be viewed statically – as viewers are used from paintings, drawings, etchings or photography.”
In 2015 I was asked by Vienna’s tourism agency whether I’d be up to show some of the cities’ highlights for a video they’d produce.
We spent two days together to create the following video, which has been watched over 80k times. Enjoy!
I graduated in 2011, and decided to write a PhD thesis about narratology in painting. I got a government grant that would enable me to focus on this sort of research, and ran with it.
Within a year I realized that I was unable to focus on any specific topic (narratology) within any specific media (painting) before laying down a sort of framework to understand the ontology of that medium: what eventually was published in 2015 was this framework: an ontology of painting. It covers questions like
This got to be a deep inquiry in the medium that I’d by then used for a decade.
Teresa Schaur-Wünsch wrote an article for national newspaper “Die Presse”, about the transmedial art space “mo.ë” that I co-managed from 2011-2015.
In 2014 I was interviewed about my involvement in the transmedial art space “mo.ë”, which I co-organized from 2011-2015 (more details about my experience here).
Here’s the link to the full interview, including Alex Felch, who was the artistic directer — and our only employee.
During my PhD studies I held a lecture about visual competence, focussing on the topics of canonization dynamics and big data. This happened at the Graduiertenkonferenz 2014 at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. The topics were part of the research for my PhD thesis, which I finished in 2015.
(I do not know who made this photos — please reach out for proper crediting!)
Wiener Zeitung published a text about the transmedial art space “mo.ë” that I co-managed from 2011-2015, and where a lot of my curating happened (I started curating before my PhD research, and expanded it with texts about the artists and their works, as well as public discussion formats — within the Beyond Mimesis project).
The following interview was made with Siolo Thompson during my 2013 Wolfram residency in Seattle, which she organized.
The works of the Austrian artist Christian Bazant-Hegemark deal with the combination of narrative painting and abstraction.
The paradoxical balance of presence and absence, of formulation and creation and of suggestion and meaning is present in all his works. The artist creates an attractive strife. It is challenging to interpret his work, because the viewer is often confused by the change of surface perception. The interplay between the figurative and the abstract may not be limited to one interpretation. Like the work “Your Thick Elephantine Yet So Delicately penetrable Skin” (2011), depicting a girl on a swing. The swing is fitted with a geometrically patterned background and is therefore connected with a surreal element.
Thus the fragmentary starts a communication with the narrative points and a complex dialogue develops. Nothing will be spoken. The figuration monopoly must not oppose the ideas of abstraction. The picture elements appear in fragmentary moments, which can avoid the provability of possible interpretations because they have nothing to prove. The images remain in an uncertain familiarity that seems to have no place. The composition occurs here as a measuring system, pushing whether neither the appropriateness of narrative nor the indulgence of abstraction in the foreground. What we encounter in the works of Christian Bazant-Hegemark, is the floating posture of the fragmentary: the vacuum of groundlessness.
(Link)
In 2011 was asked by British Airways magazine to highlight some personal favorites of Vienna. =)
In May 2011, the New York Times published an article about Florian Staudinger’s Austrian estate, the “Hammerhaus”, which you can read here. The original article contained photos of all sorts of art works installed in the castle — one of them being my work “Equilibrium” (2010).
I graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in June 2011. This is a view into the studio I had in the last year there.
Ö1 published this text about my art studies back in 2010 (the text was republished in 2017, hence the date on their website).
The following interview was published on February 24th, 2011 by Gabriela Kisová of Krokus Galeria (Bratislava), where I had an exhibition at the time.
Gabriela Kisová (GK): Before studying at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, you were programming video games. Painting is the classical static medium – do you miss any kind of “action”?
Christian Bazant-Hegemark (CBH): The whole idea of starting to paint was to get away from an undo-based, kind of inconsequential routine that dictated my professional programming life. I grew tired of it. It started to annoy me. Obviously, the “action” that you mention is what enters your life exactly when there is consequence. So to me, the traditional media are something I explicitly chose for some of its basic attributes – not being able to work in versions/branches, not being able to step back when you messed something up, and then also, because I cared for a medium that very much allowed me to work alone, to create the whole ‘vision’ by myself – not to work in a team; but this of course leads to a whole different set of problems…
GK: You paint and draw. Do you consider your drawings to be preparations for the paintings?
CBH: I rarely consider drawings to be sketches. I tend to work on a piece until there’s the feeling that it’s strong enough to stand by itself – so even if drawings are made to better understand the problems of a painting, usually i want the drawing to have some kind of inner life, to be able to not only coexist. But for a year now all energy went into painting, because its innate attributes somehow can’t be approached or understood when working in other media. Also, instead of drawing, for the last couple paintings the preparations were more done by writing things down, verbally – not by drawing.
GK: One can often see prior drafts in your finished work – for example when you don’t get a figure’s hand right, you draw on top of it, but don’t erase the initial strokes. Do you like to show mistakes?
CBH: So of course: There are no mistakes. The idea to show prior ‘versions’ of a piece appeared because I liked to emphasize that the finished piece really is nothing more then the result of a certain set of decisions: other’s could have been made. Then also some people see these thin lines as auras – I like this emphasis.
But in general i guess i simply like the idea of opening up the process, to let the viewer get a glimpse of understanding of the route that led to a finished piece.
GK: How’s your relationship to color? Do you use color intuitively or programmatically?
CBH: I don’t get color. My relationship to it is broken somehow. I think my strongest work uses only black, or a rather monochromatic palette with an additional ochre and umber. But at one point I decided to open up the palette, to investigate it, in a very unscientific way – and I’m still stuck there – at the moment I use colors all over the canvas, even the primer is peppered with pigments.
Maybe it’s a defense strategy, to divert from the works real problems. Maybe color is diversion.
GK: A traditional question: What are your sources of inspiration?
CBH: I don’t really deal with inspiration; there’s a life outside the studio, where lots of things happen that need to be processed, and then there’s another life in the studio, where the processing leads to a certain form. The themes that occupy me most are the daily grind, and thoughts about how relationships between humans work – so maybe we could say that these topics are what drive my work.
GK: What are you working on at the moment?
CBH: I started working on a group of large-scale paintings last autumn, and finished one so far – trying to get away from a certain formalism i used in the past, and aiming to fabricate a new one that feels more adequate to the problems at hand. I try to think more about paint, and less about painting. The canvases are loosely based on ideas about relationships, and try to create a kind of Lynchean atmosphere.
