New Surrealism
Fabian Köttl, born in Vöcklabruck in 1996. Lives and works in Vienna. Represented by the AG18 Gallery in Vienna, where he is regularly shown in exhibitions. Köttl completed his studies with Daniel Richter in June 2023. Already collected privately. Daniel Richter himself has acquired a painting by him. His painting “The Great Loss” was awarded the Cape10 Art Prize 2023.
Fabian Köttl draws his inspiration from free-flowing thoughts. From fantasies drawn from the unconscious, from fairy tales, myths, legends, dreams and from keen observations of everyday life. An uninhibited flow of thoughts, a psychic automatism, triggers new associations and fantasies. Köttl does not paint his pictures in a predetermined process. They are created, as the psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi would have put it, in “flow”.
His works are profound explorations of the hidden, the mysterious, the unconscious, the archetypal. The not immediately recognizable and difficult to explain.
Painted with precision and subtlety, they are not real depictions of events or external happenings. On the canvas, he creates supernatural compositions, confusing situations and constellations, with – down to the smallest detail – grotesque, weird, whimsical, alien elements that (initially) seem incongruous in their composition and contradict our usual perception.
This is precisely where the charm and power of his works lie. They are full-bodied pictures. They challenge us to step out of familiar patterns of perception and interpretation. They stimulate discovery and draw viewers into their own “flow”. They open the view – through rigid intellectual beliefs that do not really grasp the essentials about the world and human existence.
Unconscious wishes, fears, longings, worries, fears, illusions, masquerades, overestimated expectations and abilities determine human life. Usually more than reason. Pure reason” is a chimera. Köttl’s works confront us with this. They tell fables and present us with riddles, with the urge to make sense of them. And to draw insights from them ourselves. In this way, they are also an invitation for viewers to explore themselves.
Köttl’s works are characterized by diversity. They cannot all be strictly assigned to one genre. Most of the works could be understood as fantastic realism or new surrealism, although there are no sharp dividing lines between these two categories either.
Art inspired by myths, dreams and fantasies existed much earlier. Just think of Hieronymus Bosch or Fransico de Goya. Surrealism, which developed in the 1920s, was strongly influenced by psychology and psychoanalysis. Fantastic realism was also affected by this, as it did not offer simple depictions of people or events, but sought to capture what was hidden behind them, what was essential. Today, modern neuroscience confirms this: What we perceive, think and feel, want or fear is not primarily determined by the mind. In everything, the human brain interconnects areas that are responsible for thinking and feelings.
The “New Surrealism” – to which we can count Ewa Juszkiewcz, Matt Hansel or Carl Dobsky, for example – has broken away from the bizarre assumptions of its predecessors, such as André Breton’s view that insanity is “a form of mental liberation”. He has also broken away from Marxist hegemony and the imposition of “solving the main problems of life”.
Köttl’s works do not follow a manifesto. He does not have to explain them. We have to look at them. Then they take us on fantastic journeys on which we encounter the outlandish, the strange, the profound, the unconscious, the ludicrous, the bizarre, the creepy, the comical, the amusing and the always surprising.
