Gabi Trinkaus

Gabi Trinkaus refers to herself as a "media thief." She cuts up glossy magazines into small pieces, using them as source material for her collages of portraits and city landscapes which refer to the aesthetics of advertising and the mass media. Common poses, ideals of beauty, and commodity offerings are picked up and sampled in the large works. In these makeovers of faces and bodies, Trinkaus generates a superficially perfect form, enticing the beholder into a visual trap, consciously using media and advertising iconography as bait for the first glance. By borrowing from an aesthetic associated with the world of advertising and celebrated iconic faces, Trinkaus plays with the idea of seduction in her work. With the help of the collage technique, she creates a Frankenstein-like resurrection of the dissected advertising subject. Like layers of make up pealing away, the faces and bodies seem to dissolve and reveal the mask-like character of our daily life performances.

In her urban landscapes, Gabi Trinkaus raises questions on our private and public identities, social roles, and room for action that find their way into the social and architectural space of urban environments. The brightness of the city views is fed from the offerings and supposedly glamorous world of flashing cameras of magazines. Between labels and text fragments, alongside champagne bottles, cars, and watches, pistols and handcuffs are woven into the large surface visual deceptions, pointing to the ambivalence of globalized life.

Gabi Trinkaus had solo shows at FO.KU.S in Tirol (2009) and Georg Kargl Fine Arts (2008). Her works have been on view at Kunsthalle Krems (2009), Kunsthalle Wien, project space, Vienna (2007) or Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Johanneum, Graz (2005).