Sebastian Schager

The work of Sebastian Schager does not try to give direct answers or even communicate accusations. It is much more about asking questions and provoking a dialogue. To each viewer in his or her own very special iconographic and iconological setting, the contents of his painting present themselves as different. The artist is interested in differentiated possibilities of interpretation and the field of tension they create – it is not entirely unintentional that some of his works can be interpreted as provocative … For example, the placement of a religious symbol in combination with tears can trigger a variety of thought patterns. The artist is interested in the blurriness which results from the seemingly arbitrary mixing of readable objects in a diffuse mixture and confronts the viewer with the challenge of “sharpening”.

The work of Sebastian Schager sees itself as a reflection of a flooded media society, an environment in which the individual and society as a whole has too little time to understand. Things are not dissolved and worked off but stacked. These media piles and media scraps are brought into tension, composted and passed on for processing.

The concept “Wheel of Fortune” goes one step further, partially relieves the artist of his power of decision and addresses modernist questions to the art system on a postmodern meta-level. A random generator filters image collections at random and manifests them on canvas by the hand of the painter. Seemingly randomly complex media remixes are created. Clusters of themes hover like a sword of Damocles above a reception of art, that is both – pregnant with meaning and empty of content.