Trains taking off into the clouds, trees rooted in the air and a forest in a stadium: The Austrian architect and painter Max Peintner became renowned for his surrealist utopian drawings and paintings in the 1970s – works in which he presents a cartoon-like critique of civilisation and technology. The Swiss artist and initiator of artistic interventions Klaus Littmann was inspired by Peintner’s painting The Unbroken Attraction of Nature (1970/71), which shows a forest within the stadium. The result was his large-scale project For Forest (Klagenfurt, 2019) in which he planted 299 trees in the Wörthersee Stadium in Klagenfurt. The project was supported by 299 tree sponsors, including the KOLLITSCH Group, and each sponsor received a replica of the painting, with colours added manually by Littmann, each in a slightly different way. The pictures bear the signatures of both artists.
Olga Pedan works using a range of media such as installation, video, photography and painting and often addresses social issues and their social and economic correlations. In Friendly and Swamp, the artist confronts the painting process itself with physical experiences and perception. The coloured lines and surfaces are positioned on the soft white Gesso like delicate tracks on the picture surface and generate new space in which feelings and experiences are expressed as if in a microcosm of underlying emotions.
— Magdalena Koschat