Born 1972 in Vienna. Lives and works in Vienna.

Tillman Kaiser has developed an offshoot visual language of the Austrian Gothic. He is in lockstep with contemporary arts fixation with the recycling of images and its reassessment of the legacy of Modernism. Within a formal geometric symmetry and subdued palette his paintings are rhythmic undulations on the splintered image databank that informs us in a thousand ways each day. Human and insect eyes, African faces, microorganisms, masks, totems, anonymous Modernist sculptural forms, and mid-20th century industrial objects alternate and converge into seemingly low spectrum patterns and waves. Amidst the stripped down Op Art aesthetic and fanciful Modernist underpinnings, Kaiser collates layers of information into witty urban conceits. Constructivist sculptural forms that play off of the paintings highlight a sci-fi dystopia element. There are ready-made components positioned atop or within the graceful cardboard constructs. Painted in black India ink, blunt enamel gray, neutral pearl white, or shellacked, they appear as benevolent talismans born from alien technology. Kaiser elevates the banal overload aspects of global cultural noise into riffs on our shattered hierarchies. Using a coded visual alliteration he is a storyteller of a reality that cannot be seen, but is always subject to a psychic connection between the conscious and the subconscious.

Max Henry