The works of Loretta Stats display a progressive preoccupation with stylistic means and rigorous commitment to experimentation, abstraction, composition, play with light and shadow.

The artist simultaneously compresses, condenses and expands several formal tendencies - in the paintings of recent years amidst social innovations, drawing from indispensable variations, emerging in a cyclical way of working - to ultimately develop a distinct visual imagery. The visual stimuli arise from the interplay of diverse techniques used; skills such as the wet-on-wet technique, simultaneous and successive contrast, collage, the inexhaustible possibilities of broad brushwork as well as the fragility of watercolored surfaces, combined with the profundity of exact, fine graphic lines enable the creation of entire pictorial worlds in individual paintings.

The subjects are dedicated to the exploration of the symbol-laden, multifaceted manifestations of flora. The repeated use of motifs (birds, origami, geometric and free forms, forms derived from the surrounding nature, human figures), the energetic color worlds, as well as the interactions of detailed representations condensed in labor-intensive processes, some of which are strongly abstracted to their original forms, simultaneously lead and abduct the viewer into a cosmos full of mystery and passion.

Loretta Stats studied painting and graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She is the winner of the Walter Koschatzky Art Prize 2011.

Fotocredit © Friedrich Zorn