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Untitled, Size 35x25cm, Oil on Canvas
Untitled, Size 35x25cm, Oil on Canvas
Untitled, Size 35x25cm, Oil on Canvas
Untitled, Size 35x25cm, Oil on Canvas
Untitled, Size 35x25cm, Oil on Canvas
Untitled, Size 35x25cm, Oil on Canvas

Untitled, Size 35x25cm, Oil on Canvas
Untitled, Size 35x25cm, Oil on Canvas
Untitled, Size 35x25cm, Oil on Canvas
Untitled, Size 35x25cm, Oil on Canvas
Untitled, Size 35x25cm, Oil on Canvas
Untitled, Size 35x25cm, Oil on Canvas
For the artist’s fourth solo show at SONG SONG, Austrian painter Rainer Spangl presents new paintings in an established series focused on the gaze, serving as a continuation of his 2016 exhibition ‘Within a Room’. In these small-scale paintings on canvas, Spangl seems to zoom and crop into aspects of traditional portraiture which reveal the intimate and the enigmatic, probing the very event of looking. One’s own gaze is drawn across the room to follow that of the anonymous subject’s look just as we find ourselves wandering into these suggested sightlines ourselves. Hung at exactly eye level, prized real estate in places such as supermarkets where brands often pay a premium to be placed at an eye-catching vantage point, we browse the row of eyes as much as they browse us. The works are clearly part of a series, yet call for viewing as stand-alone portraits characterised by the hints of observable interior states to be found in each one; here the beginning of a smile, there the faint suggestion of a frown.
 
Introducing darkly tender paintings of repeated plant subjects, a Schneerose (winter rose) which grows in the garden of his Vienna studio, a bougainvillea from his home and others, Spangl explores the same minute mystery when it comes to the natural world. Out of his interest in public and private spaces, he says “I have evolved organically into working with different types of light and how they have involved the mood of the works. I have been working off images in which the plant and face are lit by street lamps or fluorescent lighting instead of daylight, lighting from different angles, these spontaneous circumstances bring new things to the surface. Something mechanical, something natural.”
 
Rainer Spangl (b. 1977) is an artist working in Vienna, Austria.