Heinz Gappmayr

The meditative character of Andrea Bischof’s paintings is directly related to the way they are produced and the materials used. The artist works out of the depth of the surface.  The complexly prepared coloured ground is painted over. The islands and dots of light and dark c  olours which are spread over the surface are omitted and not added. the coloured surface appears as a layer. Compactness is suspended. The underground is present but not visible. The floating and the hidden are the real substance of Andrea Bischof’s paintings, structured through the instability of the forms and the intuitively distributed coloured accents. Her works can be essentially distinguished from each other through the colours but also through the differential importance of the details.

This artistic concept corresponds to the use of tissue paper in another medium. Water dissolves the colour in this extremely sensitive material and produces informal structures which are either integrated into free curving configurations or left untouched. The artist also makes transparency a theme in over-layered sheets of tissue paper with abstract forms whose graduated grey tones suggest depth. The shapes are not drawn but sown. Due to the sensitivity of the material the use of thread and tissue paper is of especial interest.

In her subtile works Andrea Bischof is interested in differentiating the relationship between the visible and the non-visible. The choice of material and the correspondence to the structure and the colours  play an important role. She does not adhere to a specific scheme but allows one to follow the process beginning to the final stage of the painting. Everything remains open, the individual work does not remove itself from the from the others nor from the observer. Without falling into the banal, the artist advances into ever new. often contradictory approaches to a level which can no longer be discussed. The high quality of her paintings becomes clear especially in this stability and clarity with sensitive materials.

Heinz Gappmayr