The works by painter Johanna Kandl are a pressing mix of classical technique, media-critique, documentation and socio-political resistance. For many years, she has travelled, observed and experienced, together with her husband and professional partner Helmut Kandl, Eastern Europe up to the edges of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Russia. Her work comments on the political changes in “transition countries” after 1989, the kind of neo-liberal shock therapy in which only the laws of the free-market apply. She translates the results of her research into aesthetic units that, beyond her artistic signature, also transmit reflectional and orientational knowledge and have use in the visual as space for experience and dialogue.

Like all of Johanna Kandlʼs pictures, O.T., 2011, also originated from a photo of a direct personal experience. With Helmut (at that time an employee of steelproducing voestalpine Group) she visited in the 1970s the mining-town of Zenica in Bosnia, northwest of Sarajevo. Together, they walked through the market square. The market-hours were over and empty tables on wooden sawhorses presented themselves in an austere array – a type of serial concept-notation made of minimalistic color-fields and diagrams. For the medial translation of photography into painting, Johanna Kandl “inscribed” the tables with the names of artists, philosophers, scientists and politicians. She accomplishes this with the assistance of small wooden panels that she glues to the canvas – the tempera picture becomes a collage, a cultural technique that implies collecting – collecting of material but also collecting of ideas, knowledge, information. Johanna Kandl arranges the names alphabetically, like in an index of names in an anthology of “Big Names” in culture, industry and politics. This yields amusing proximities; Kant, Keynes and Lenin share a bench. The artist organizes the image space as a stage for histories and stories that emerge from the accidental juxtaposition of political theory and art – of Hannah Arendt and Christian Boltanski, of philosopher Gilles Deleuze and Oleg Deripaska, Russian oligarch, of social psychologist Marie Jahoda and Appleʼs founder Steve Jobs. One could speak of a modern allegory, an historical painting, an optical discourse and intelligent composition. The most wonderful thing about Johanna Kandlʼs paintings is, however, the fact that they deal with open entities, casual fragments with the potential for all types of interpretation.

Brigitte Huck, 2015 (translation: Virginia Dellenbaugh)