Michael Ornauer : Beyond Surface
The large-scale works dominate, enhancing the sense of lightness, whose depth intensifies as it unfolds beyond the purely physical surface. In Beyond Surface, Michael Ornauer reveals another dimension in his work: “nothing is purely surface, everything resonates,” inviting viewers into fascination through flowing plays of color. The new series, created since May, will be on view from November 12 to December 19, 2025, at the Schaulager of Galerie SUPPAN in Vienna, Doblhoffgasse 7.
In contrast to his usually more materially “weighty” oil paintings, the Viennese artist works for these new watercolors with watery acrylic paints on primed cotton. In his engagement with color, he fully explores its properties through usage. Ornauer plays the entire spectrum—painting all extremes, gradually revealing more and more intermediate tones in his successive, visible development, giving space to both transparency and the spaces in between. Calling the works harmonious compositions would be too “simple” for him. He strives for balance, a midpoint between warm and cool, light and dark, transparent and opaque: “It needs a loud, strong part as well as a gentle, quiet part. We have the outliers and the path in between. The great challenge is to unite everything in a single painting.” Predecessors of the exhibited pieces—including a triptych measuring 200 x 450 cm, the largest in terms of dimensions—were many small sketches in watercolor on paper. Ornauer succeeds in transferring this special luminosity onto the large canvas.
In the large-format acrylic series, Ornauer incorporates his characteristic stripes, which resemble color-field transitions, almost rainbow-like, but in a rhythm altered by color and texture. While early traces of these movements could already be seen in his recent abstract oil paintings, the flowing motions have now intensified, becoming ever longer, at times extending beyond the painting’s edges—which Ornauer typically leaves untreated and open to view—before returning. They transform into “flows of color” that generate both permeability and density, in which the colors reveal their different characters, softly or turbulently extending into space.
“Art is a wonderful instrument to break something open.” Ornauer’s handling of the surface—diving deeper into something in order ultimately to break through it, opening it to a new perception—symbolizes his mindset. “If I don’t have the ambition to go beyond, then no development happens.” Ornauer’s approach to his work is intuitive. For him, painting is a meditative introspection that ultimately manifests as gestural spontaneity on the canvas, created without reference to anything in the real world. Through the act of creating art, shifting consciousness toward something new is, in Ornauer’s view, both his personal mission and his societal contribution—and he encapsulates this in his oeuvre: “Form is content. Content is form.”
Text: Natalie Kreutzer
