Light

It begins with seeing. Without light there is no image, no form, no colour — light is the precondition for perceiving art at all, and at the same time, in every single work, often its true subject. We belong to the few creatures that see colour in its full richness: what remains a coarse grid of light and dark for most animals unfolds for us into a spectrum of millions of nuances. We owe this ability solely to light, which falls onto a surface, a sheet, a canvas, and is thrown back from it — refracted, filtered, transformed.

But light is more than a physical condition of seeing. It is also a psychological, almost an existential force. It makes the day feel friendly and lifts the mood; it gives us strength and lets us hope, when a morning grows brighter after a long night. It directs the gaze — toward what matters, toward what is meant to be highlighted, while everything else recedes into shadow. Light provides orientation and focus: wherever it falls, that is where we begin to look.

The exhibition “Light” brings together seven positions that engage with this theme in quite different ways — from quiet morning moods to atmospheric abstraction, from earthbound landscape to a gaze turned upward, into the sky itself.

In “Early Morning on the March”, Lubomir Hnatovic shows a scene of first light: the river still lies in hazy blue, yet on the horizon a warm gold is already breaking through the trees, laying itself as a reflection on the water. It is that moment when light literally returns — and with it, the energy for the day.

With “View of the Dachstein”, Gottfried Pengg-Auheim leads us into the alpine expanse. In bold brushwork with thickly applied oil paint, he shows us the view from Aussee looking south; here light meets a high valley and makes a single streak of yellow-green glow, while the surrounding flanks blur into shadow and cool blue. Here, light is a director: it decides what is seen, letting the rest of the landscape recede.

In “Edge of Day”, Wolfgang Sinwel approaches the theme from a dreamlike vantage point, conceived as if from a bird's-eye view. The earth becomes a plane, over which a delicate band of colour in pink and white stretches — the edge of day, where light and landscape blur into one another and the boundary between figuration and abstraction becomes porous.

In “Autumn”, Lara Bandilla relies on a very different effect: backlight breaking through a canopy of leaves and a glass roof, immersing two figures on a path in an all-overpowering brightness. The figures become silhouettes, and light itself becomes the true protagonist of the scene — an image of how light can also conceal, when it dazzles us, when it becomes too much for us. Nothing is simply good, nothing is simply bad.

Katharina Walter, too, shows us overflowing light in her own way; effervescent brightness that lets us make out only the outlines of human shapes. The scenes become dreams, in which the figures are unrecognisable shadows whose language we do not understand, whose ideas we do not know, and whose gestures are almost swallowed by the light. Plato's allegory of the cave comes to mind: everything we perceive is shadow, and we spend a lifetime trying to discover its meaning.

In “Sky 2”, David A. Kilvington looks straight upward. The canvas is entirely taken up by clouds, their volume modelled purely by the play of light and shadow within them. Without horizon, without landscape, only pure observation remains: how light creates form where there is really only water vapour.

Angharad Taris glows with expressive colours, showing what light can trigger in our eyes: a kaleidoscope of colours that breaks a calm landscape into a spectrum that has more to do with abstract emotion than with natural description — a view across valleys that become carpets of colour as an homage to light.

Seven artists, seven visual languages, complemented by light objects by Andreas Hülber — art can be a source of joy, an almost inexhaustible source of strength, every time we see a work that touches us at our core.