Christoph und Markus Getzner

Christoph and Markus Getzner have worked together for over ten years. In this time the brothers have developed an oeuvre of great independence, which largely eludes clear positioning in the discourses of contemporary art. It is marked by the cross-fertilization of contrasting lives: if the one, a member of the cathedral masonry team of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, is firmly placed in the “vita activa”, the other, a monk in a Buddhist monastery at Lake Geneva, is wholly dedicated to the “vita contemplativa”. Several times a year they come together to collaborate and create drawings, sculptures, objects and installations of great originality and precision craftsmanship, which invariably are informed by these two poles of human life.

Christoph and Markus Getzner work within an exciting framework of formal language and world views. Allusions to art history serve their substantive concerns. Drawing, painting, architecture and sculpture merge in their works into a highly symbolic amalgam that spans the material world on the one hand and the intellectual and spiritual world on the other. With their adroit interplay between stability and instability, pictorial tradition and image voidance, cultural tradition and philosophical reflection, the artists succeed in creating works that initially pose a riddle. But if we give ourselves to these works, if we activate alike our sense perception and our thought, then they open a vast space which we, as viewers, can fill with our own insights. They enable us to live a concrete life, which brings action, thought and feeling together. And this shortens or dilates time. If time seems to us short, then it has been good. If we experience it as prolonged, then we have done something wrong.

(Extract from „The brevity of duration“, Friedemann Malsch)