1969

born in linz/austria

since 1980

drawings

1990 – 2006

paintings with oil / mixed technique

1994

first objects with meat

2006 1st action

until 2012 severel videos

since 2007

videos with animal cadavers

2014

drawings – objects – performance – videos

 

Born in Linz, Upper Austria, in 1969, Andreas Mares belongs to those artistic talents that have reached an innovative and authentic form of expression only through an aimed psychological process of self knowledge. In parallel with his successful career as a graphic designer the artist  develops  a special skill in drawing since his childhood and matures his gift far away from traditional Academies of Fine Arts in a very unconventional manner. So, at the age of ten, he begins to draw, at the age of twenty he intensifies his art with painting, five years later he conceives his first objects.

 

Drawing becomes sort of a key medium for his entire art, sort of a vehicle which merges with different materials in order to abandon the fusion afterwards. In 2006 Andreas Mares enriches his techniques by means of video works and from that period video art gets a corner stone of his art, accompanied by perfomances and actions.

 

The appassionate search of his self and the confrontation with his childhood, in general and in particular, focuses on a series of works entitled „ Psychotauma „ In the course of several years, Mares considers it a main plot under various perspectives, fromvideo art to drawing , from painting to sculpture. Mares criticizes any kind of estheticism and demands unlimited preparedness from his audience to occupy itself with his art in an active way and to experience the world as a dynamic event. Without any doubt the early encounter between Mares and the Actionist Otto

Mühl has a retroactive effect on his artistic evolution, as Otto Mühl aspired to develop a new way of perception which should have assigned a new function to experimental art. The body, nudeness and fragility – under different point of views – move into the center of observation and become a metapher for the subtile patina of civilzation. The more extreme the artist represents body conditions in his  video works , the more intense becomes his spiritual force.

 

In a similar dimension his objects find a touching position which goes beyond the objective to stage the beauty and  the terror very closely. In 1994 his first head-objects come into being, made of pieces of crude meat which were sewed together. The freeze-dried sculptures appear as placeholders of unhuman behaviour, of violence and passion, and become then of course archaeological fragments of analytical self-excavation.

 

The period from 2009 to 2013 is marked by a very intense video production which brings up a new topic, the blurring of bounderies between Man and Animal, which is exemplarily stressed in the video „Zugvogel„ The flight of a bird ends violently on the window of a car. The artist tries to save the bird’s life and from eye to eye with the blessed animal the artist experiences his everyday’s death demonstrated in his failures , in his reverting back to past situations, in his hesitance and indecision. In 2012 this work gets integrated in Roland Schimmelpfennig’s „ Der Goldene Drache „ in a  production by Ewa Teilman at the Citytheater of Aachen.

 

In his recent video „ Vom langen Schlaf der Grillen „ an insect acts as a protagonist in front of the camera.  All of a sudden, emphatic Mares comes over a grasshopper that meets with an accident and whose agony evokes a form of ideational realization. The artist intends to sharpens our perception by means of existential arguments : the biological process of life, the criticism on civilization and a deeper consciousness of our environment in a society which is used to reproduce everything on the big screen but which has no time to perceive Nature as a fundamental space of life and which has become an alien in the world of animals-.

 

The transposition of Andreas Mares‘ topics menas already a decisive change : after many attempts to reach his inner self, he finally gets near to his center, to his substance which remains intact despite a number of previous crisis . 2013 new projects come into being, circumstantial evidence for that kind of metamorphosis which can only be the result of creativity as the most efficient of all therapies. At the same time this indicates a vectorial transfer from individual history to the collective area of tension in our society.

 

The actual project „ Zuckerhaus“ is a very intelligent illustration of the moral of antique animal legends. A simple fly becomes the icon of a consumer society that has lost any limit

and aims at a more comforable life through the trade of luxurious goods. The extreme poetry of

Andreas Mares‘ works is situated far away from digital games and cannot be decoded at a first glimpse. His art stimulates the spectator continously with an unknown network of references, surprises with unusual perspectives in order to permit new introspections. His gradual evolution on the tortuous path towards creativity can be considered extreme as well, as it is an  outstanding example of an evolution which experiences the process of becoming a human being as a form of art.

 

Since 2009  Andreas Mares confirms his presence in an international network of Art Centers and Cultural Institutions, Video Art Festivals, and Exhibitions. In 2011 he participates in the Große Kunstausstellung at theHaus der Kunst, Munich. In the last year he was invited to present his works in international Video Shows, among which Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Istanbul, Venice, Varna, Rome, and in spring 2013 Mares takes part in the 5^th Festival de Videoarte in Camagüey, Cuba. He is one of the winners of the VII. Edition of the Magmart Video Festival at the Casoria Contemporary Art Museum which nominates him for the participation in Project 900. In autumn 2013 Mares is invited as one of the guests to present a new video work on the American author Henry James and his relations with Italy, in order to promote the internatonal video contest „ Remember Henry James „ in the cities where James wrote his books : Florence, Venice and Rome.

 

beth vermeer