Since the invention of the photographic medium, photography and painting have been in close interaction. While photography was initially oriented towards painting and its atmospheric effect, painting in turn used photographic motifs as a model. In the 20th century, the boundaries between the art disciplines became increasingly blurred and the photographic image became part of painterly strategies. Today, the repertoire of all media is used as a matter of course.

The fact that Adolf Frohner also owes essential impulses for his work to his engagement with the photographic medium became apparent through the processing of his archive. From the 1960s onwards, Frohner went in search of traces with his camera and was interested in structures and signs on walls as well as in the inconspicuous and random. Experimenting, he incorporated his own and found photographs into his painterly objects and, with this integration of the photographic image, made a decisive contribution to the expansion of the panel painting and the discourse on image and reality.

The exhibition shows for the first time the connection between Adolf Frohner's photography and his painting and outlines the relationship between photography and painting in works by Frohner's contemporaries up to the present generation on the basis of significant examples of his work.

Curator: Elisabeth Voggeneder

Artists: Heinz Cibulka, Andreas Dworak, Adolf Frohner, Gerhard Kaiser, Michael Part, Wolfgang Raffesberg, Arnulf Rainer, Fritz Simak