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Exhibition: DANSE MACABRE II
Artist: Peter Baldinger
Duration: 12 July – 26 July 2024

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Dissolution — the central concern in Baldinger’s work — is also at the core of his project Danse macabre, initiated in 2022. The project engages with Hans Holbein the Younger’s woodcut series Images of Death, created around 1525. While Holbein’s original 41 pairings — in which Death, symbolized by a skeleton, drags representatives of all social classes from life — were no larger than a matchbox and executed with extraordinary precision and detail, Baldinger’s counterparts are enlarged to an almost monumental scale and rendered nearly unrecognizable through the overlay of an intentionally overly coarse grid.

Even though the works in the Rough Grid series result in a markedly different aesthetic from Baldinger’s pixelated Low_resolutions or the Diffusions, the artist continues to investigate the same fundamental phenomenon: how far can information loss caused by imprecise, blurred, or abbreviated representation progress before the viewer becomes completely unaware of the actual content?

Hans Holbein the Younger demonstrated that death renders everyone equal — king and beggar, bishop and merchant, old woman and child — dissolving social distinctions regardless of individual aspirations, quite apart from the physical dissolution itself. Baldinger seeks to strip the inevitable of its terror by formally anticipating this process of dissolution within the images themselves.

On the occasion of the 18th Carinthian Dialogues
Opening: Friday, 12 July 2024, 8:00 pm
Opening remarks by: Agnes Husslein-Arco
Director, Heidi Horten Collection