During steirischer herbst '20 we are pleased to present to the audience in the frame of this year’s tour the exhibitions "Image Wars. The Power of Images“ and "Gerlind Zeilner. Cowgirls.“

Different aspects of visual memory are in the focus of the international exhibition „Image Wars. The Power of Images“. The production, consumption, and instrumentalization of visual material continually affects social and aesthetic visual memory and thus contributes to our understanding of cultural and historical events. This still new power of images has particular impact in the context of represented or actually practiced physical or psychological violence, with the experience of personal or collective trauma. Against this backdrop, the exhibition focuses on political conflicts and the images that remind us of them.

On the second exhibition level the solo exhibition "Cowgirls" by the artist Gerlind Zeilner is on show. The artist is interested in the tensions and ambiguities within painting, including pictorial ideas shaped by a male-dominated art history that tends to the clichéd. In her structural significant and therein fragile, broken virtuosity, Zeilner works on figurative-abstract pictorial spaces full of critical and colorful suggestions about the existence of a female painter among male painters—of women among men.