works
Wolfgang Pavlik belongs to a generation of artists that redefines and reorganizes painting. In his work Pavlik develops new compositional forms as a reflex to apparent oppositions such as abstraction versus figuration. Pavlik bases his portraits on photos from newspapers and collective memory. The men and women of his works however process no identity. The origin, social position and occupation of each subject are indefinable.
Through the obscuration of the subject with fields of colour Pavlik suggests the semantics of abstract art. His pictures reflect the relationship between photography and painting but also the changes which the perceptive sense has gone through on the ground of the development of the medial greater technology.
The beam which one finds in many of the pictures is among other things the symbol of the extinguishment of the subject shrinking to black box, the redevelopment of the act of seeing to the non-personal apparatus of seeing. Pavliksinterest in influencing reception through presentation shows a conceptual element in his art.
James Kaye
Hannah (2000)