The title of Silvia Ederer’s first solo exhibition in a major institution, "zero hero: a manoeuvre behind the language of light", shown in the Künstlerhaus KM–, Halle für Kunst & Medien comes from a block of works in a series of her major paintings. The artist (born 1972 in Graz, lives in Vienna) has developed her artistic practice around the decisive poles of photography, painting and light.

Ederer works equally with fusions as with fractures; thus for example she relates arthistory and pop-culture phenomena and restages details from a film noire universe with their own effects developed out of a situation of suspense. The image worlds of her epic realistic painting, marked by black and white and lightdark contrasts, develop on the canvas or in the three-dimensional environment of the exhibition situation, and conceal possible results of the reshaping of realities through their shadowy visual dramaturgy. Precisely in sketching out potential absence of decisive image elements and the concentration on apparently harmless details such as fences, curtains or foggy structures, the artist employs her painting and display tricks to show ways of suspending premature conclusions with regard to content, and the permeability between a spatial exterior and a narrative interior.

“My decision to concentrate totally on painting again came about simply from the recognition that this medium is the most challenging for me in the sense that there is no apparatus between me and the painting ground that produces a finished image. There is nothing, I assume nothing and at the same time have all the possibilities in the world. Sometimes it takes a long time until the painting is finished. Occasionally there is still space for something else. Because of this, too, the analysis of one’s own work is always very intensive and penetrating.”
Silvia Ederer in the catalogue "light shapes the shadow" (Verlag für moderne Kunst, Nuremberg, 2013)

Exhibitions (Selection)
light shapes the shadow, Kunstraum Bernsteiner, Vienna (2013)
The Absence, Ve:sch, Vienna (2012)
UnORTnung, IV to VI, temporary exhibition series, Vienna (2010)
Wiener Gerücht: Das Private und das Öffentliche, MUSA, Vienna (2009)