Wolfgang Ellenrieder

The question of the real and the fictitious has always inspired the work of the painter Wolfgang Ellenrieder. The central issue is the relation of the painted image to the digital media of image production and the decomposition of the real that is exacerbated by electronic media. In this respect, it is no coincidence that Ellenrieder's work itself exhibits a certain translucent fragility, which structurally refers to the fragile, uncertain status of the image, reality and the links existing between them. However, he is wary of one-sided partisanship. Enlightenment pathos is just as little his thing as lamenting the virtualisation of our reality. Its thin ice is rather the perfect substrate for the truth of his painterly investigations, which, in a beautiful dialectical narrowing, consists above all in playing with the methods of forgery. Ellenrieder gives these strange, free-floating image bastards a fragile identity.