Born 1975 | Lives and works in Vienna, Austria
Guided by impulse and intuition, Hannes Schauer paints buoyant abstractions that find inspiration in the natural world. The Vienna-based artist privileges accident, surprise, and indeterminacy in his mark-making, approaching painting as a ritualistic practice. His works feature atmospheric compositions with passages that evoke familiar imagery, whether terrestrial, oceanic, infernal, or cosmic. Tidal mangroves, stalactites in a darkened cave, swarms of insects, deposits of lichen and minerals, the surprising chromatic dynamics of a geode, and mythical chimeras—such images emerge and recede as the viewer’s eye moves around the canvas. These pictorial realms conjure notions of liminality and transformation, spaces where order and signification are suspended, and abstract thought might emerge. In this way, the artist’s modes of creating and his resulting works are deeply aligned. Informed both by his work as a composer of electronic music and as a psychological advisor for neurodiverse youths, his visual practice seeks to convey experiences of transcendence and possibility.
Laying his canvas on the floor, Schauer splashes the surface with diluted ink and acrylic pigment, sometimes incorporating other unconventional materials such as seaweed and tomato paste. He then builds on emergent lines or flows of medium, allowing these suggestions of form to steer his engagement with the image. He continuously works back into the painting, adding, obscuring, and scratching out material. Paint drips, pools, splashes, and bleeds; is dragged and scumbled, responsive to his embodied experience as he works. “My work occupies an intuitive space beyond recognizable imagery,” the artist explains. “Before spoken language, before memory, before the intrusion of objects. The compositions reveal themselves to me during the painting process, which I describe as an adventure, creating works that are poised between chance and calculation.” The paintings that result from this meditative process teem with vivid energy, by turns turbulent, sustained, and calm.
