Robert Oswald In self-assessment: “In retrospect, there was the picture in the beginning. Copies of old masters made by his father, including Francesco Guardi, who will become one of his guides. The picture, priced with worthless numbers and displayed in the museum, is replaced by what has been reproduced and thus also supplemented. Crumpled, gridded, with fingerprints and stains in the colors of the old guild, they become a fetish. Wrapped in the scent of linseed oil and turpentine, they are his vademecum. His first copy was a Dali, his last a Vermeer and there was plenty of space in between to explore something of your own. Where there is no picture, nothing is framed. He gives the Angelus Novus a camera and from the rubble he builds pictures against the helplessness and dizziness. He faces the flood of digital images. Click. The picture maker. Venice will be his personal cash fall. 200 capricci. The drift gives way to the serenity with which he now makes assertions at the beginning of every picture. Claims with the elegant insolence that always appear at the beginning of a myth. In search of the lost here and now, pixels find their way onto paper, the old game. "
Robert Oswald is a photographer who showed surrealist photos from Venice in his very first exhibition in Vienna in 2017. Well-known things from “La Serenissima” mix in his works with surprising elements of everyday life, the imagination and sometimes also with conscious disharmonies to form a whole, which already shows the artist's unmistakable stylistic signature in this first series. His love for the city of cities is unmistakable, even if he sometimes has an almost mischievous irony.
From May 2019, his first international exhibition, "back to the roots", as it were, ran at the Lido in front of Venice.
Robert Oswald is currently working on several new projects in which both his photography and his excellent quality of drawing and painting will play a role.
Werkbeispiele von Robert Oswald:
Also noteworthy is his gradually emerging “cycle of chance”, which shows the incredible power of his portrait photography. Moments of slowness that reach far into the soul of the captured person.
