Value Added Reality: Xenia Ostrovskaya & Barbara Luisi

20.03.2025 to 11.04.2025 Galerie Lehner

With different backgrounds, both artists attempt to expand the possibilities of photography and transfer them to painting. However, the similarity is only a very broad arc between two very different approaches. Barbara Luisi is an artistic photographer who deals with the themes of finiteness, transience and the beauty of life in all its phases. Her works show the dignity and poetry of ageing and the blossoming over the course of time. She works primarily with the possibilities of photography, but she approaches painting with these technical possibilities as well as with other interventions, whereby the preservation and reproduction of natural beauty is a leitmotif. Xenia Ostrovskaya, on the other hand, explores ideas of heritage and belonging in her work by primarily taking historical photographs (postcards) as source material and alienating them by painting over them or integrating them into larger works. The nostalgia of her postcards is transformed into a gloomy background for the magical realism of the disproportionate main figures. Analytical precision meets the poetic whole through her extraordinary attention to detail, which lends her pictures both liveliness and a touch of the uncanny.