ARTIST STATEMENT

A key outcome of Hartl-Prager`s artistic approach is reflected in the fragmentary. Primarily dealing with subjective perception of space, as well as the visualization and preservation of moments therein, moving between the poles of relativistic and subjective perception and consciousness acting in a historical, political and socio-culturally evolved system.

Hartl-Prager uses photography as a means of documentation and visual post-it to archive details, geometries and shapes.
Reworking with marker was in the beginning a pragmatically chosen method to reduce to the very essentials.
Primary here is both the contextual as well as the emotional approach. As Frank Eugene said at the beginning of the 20th century in context of his photo engravings „The banal surroundings which were inessential and disruptive to the photograph as a whole were removed [..], but nothing else was changed, neither the light nor the shadows, nor the form and line“
The key point concerns the retouching of the unnecessary from the whole, which, as opposed to Eugene, happens very precisely extensively, whereby the emerging black surfaces become distinct and autonomous shapes.
The dismissals and detachments from concrete environments created by overpainting facilitates a reduced and abstracted image.
Whereas Bernd and Hilla Becher had a typographical approach by the separation of photographer and motive, here, with the series of line expansions, intuitive decision-making is purposefully given space. Thus spontaneous artistic aspects and perspectives are being considered.
The removal of object-like, geometrical structures from specific environments and the liberation of these objects from an existential clutch step into the foreground.
The strict compositions, mostly without perspective, are being parted from their specifically topographical and cultural context and so the serial arrangement enables comparisons.

This typological point of view of common, architecturally time embodying buildings, objects and the repetitious application of simple shapes outline the area of work and condense the intensity to the alignment of shapes.

BIOGRAPHY

Christina Hartl-Prager lives and works in Vienna, born 1980 in Innsbruck / Austria.

After a multiple education as journeyman for house painter, paperhanger, signage manufacturer, gilder, silversmith and basic technics of a classical sculptor, Study at Art University Linz Fine Art/Transmedial Space and at NCAD Dublin.