Matthias Noggler

Critical text

Matthias Noggler (b. 1990, Innsbruck) often jumps from one painterly style to another in a practice rooted in the tradition of confronting the medium itself. From the figurative to the still life, the artist collapses domestic and social scenes that range from the everyday to the surreal, often rendered in vivid gouache¾a paint historically favored by the Impressionists. Noggler tends to juxtapose different groups of works, as evidenced by his recent show at Layr gallery in which his paintings were spatially separated across exhibition spaces, emphasizes their interdependent relationship, revealing formal affinities and annotating themes from previous works through new painterly means. The quotidian world of objects in domestic interiors often feature in Noggler’s work, rendering moments of empirical observation in daily life in which the things we take for granted in our immediate environment can enable intimacy and familiarity, yet at the same time can feel constrictive and disempowering. In the thicket of social reality, where an individual’s participation in society involves certain demands, it is often the cultural and economic significance of objects that serves to remind us that the private is always also a public issue.

Text by Saim Demircan, Maurin Dietrich