Into the Woods
Guido Zehetbauer-Salzer
on view: 17/09/2025 - 30/10/2025
Guido Zehetbauer-Salzer draws and paints — most often, the forest.
A living organism that once cloaked the continents in green. Today, humanity has carved it back, fragmenting an ecosystem that is vital to its own survival. Zehetbauer-Salzer listens to the forest’s quiet language — its moods, its rhythms, its breath—and seeks to translate its essence into image. His work captures the raw poetry of nature: the seemingly chaotic architecture, the sensual play of color, the pulse of life within a place that is far more than a collection of trees—a sanctuary, a presence, a being.
Art historian Clara Kaufmann on the works of Guido Zehetbauer-Salzer:
"Engaging with the forest is, for Zehetbauer-Salzer, a way of recognizing the beauty and abundance of life — a consistently effective means of viewing the present (and perhaps also the future) in a positive light. Painting images of the forest provides him with an opportunity to continually recall this positive experience, to essentially find the forest within himself.
His intention is not to paint the forest in a naturalistic or realistic way, but rather as he perceives it — how he feels it, sees it, or even wishes it to be. Yet these are never fictional, purely imagined forests, but very specific forest sections that Zehetbauer-Salzer, in a sense, portrays. Every abstraction — every emphasis or reduction — he applies in his painting serves the purpose of authentically characterizing the forest: the nonessential is omitted, color nuances and contrasts are enhanced, and striking structures are accentuated, until the forest reveals its poetry even to the most nature-removed viewer and presents itself as a real fairy-tale forest.
The theme of destruction of this infinitely precious ecosystem is, of course, present in the works, but Zehetbauer-Salzer does not take the position of a moralizing admonisher. Instead, he assumes the role of an admirer, advocating for the protection of the forest by highlighting its beauty.
In Zehetbauer-Salzer’s eyes, the interplay of nuances condenses into intense color compositions that move far beyond the greens and browns one might typically expect in a forest. For him, the forest shines in all the colors of the spectrum. A winter forest may be clothed in deep blues; an autumn forest might erupt in explosions of red, orange, and pink; a shaded summer forest may reveal its magic in magenta, green, blue, and every imaginable color.
In his graphic works, the forest appears wilder, more untamed. Unlike the paintings, it is not broad color fields that convey the atmosphere, but rather impulsively drawn lines that seek to capture the forest’s characteristic traits. The drawings appear formally more abstract than the paintings and demand more imagination from the viewer to recognize the forest within them. Though they have a completely different effect, the drawings fundamentally reflect Zehetbauer-Salzer’s painterly approach. Again, the focus is on grasping essential structures — only here, in linear form. Zehetbauer-Salzer works his way from a tangle of lines to those few strokes that, with concentrated clarity, express what the many tried to say. In their intensity of color and impulsive brushwork, the drawings recall the early paintings, but through careful reduction and focus on the essence, he succeeds in saying more with less. The simultaneous presence of impulsiveness and concentration results in powerful, harmonious images that balance between horror vacui and tabula rasa.
Ultimately, in his paintings, Guido Zehetbauer-Salzer translates what nature, at its best, can teach us as humans: to focus on what is essential, to perceive the here and now, and to recognize and savor the richness of the moment."
Excerpts from the text; the full version can be found in the catalog “Guido Zehetbauer-Salzer, Homage to the Forest” (2020).
In his sculptural works, Zehetbauer-Salzer dispenses with color altogether. Here, his focus lies solely on form. These are three-dimensional drawings made from thin wire lines — tributes to nature.
Link to the works presented at the exhibition
A living organism that once cloaked the continents in green. Today, humanity has carved it back, fragmenting an ecosystem that is vital to its own survival. Zehetbauer-Salzer listens to the forest’s quiet language — its moods, its rhythms, its breath—and seeks to translate its essence into image. His work captures the raw poetry of nature: the seemingly chaotic architecture, the sensual play of color, the pulse of life within a place that is far more than a collection of trees—a sanctuary, a presence, a being.
Art historian Clara Kaufmann on the works of Guido Zehetbauer-Salzer:
"Engaging with the forest is, for Zehetbauer-Salzer, a way of recognizing the beauty and abundance of life — a consistently effective means of viewing the present (and perhaps also the future) in a positive light. Painting images of the forest provides him with an opportunity to continually recall this positive experience, to essentially find the forest within himself.
His intention is not to paint the forest in a naturalistic or realistic way, but rather as he perceives it — how he feels it, sees it, or even wishes it to be. Yet these are never fictional, purely imagined forests, but very specific forest sections that Zehetbauer-Salzer, in a sense, portrays. Every abstraction — every emphasis or reduction — he applies in his painting serves the purpose of authentically characterizing the forest: the nonessential is omitted, color nuances and contrasts are enhanced, and striking structures are accentuated, until the forest reveals its poetry even to the most nature-removed viewer and presents itself as a real fairy-tale forest.
The theme of destruction of this infinitely precious ecosystem is, of course, present in the works, but Zehetbauer-Salzer does not take the position of a moralizing admonisher. Instead, he assumes the role of an admirer, advocating for the protection of the forest by highlighting its beauty.
In Zehetbauer-Salzer’s eyes, the interplay of nuances condenses into intense color compositions that move far beyond the greens and browns one might typically expect in a forest. For him, the forest shines in all the colors of the spectrum. A winter forest may be clothed in deep blues; an autumn forest might erupt in explosions of red, orange, and pink; a shaded summer forest may reveal its magic in magenta, green, blue, and every imaginable color.
In his graphic works, the forest appears wilder, more untamed. Unlike the paintings, it is not broad color fields that convey the atmosphere, but rather impulsively drawn lines that seek to capture the forest’s characteristic traits. The drawings appear formally more abstract than the paintings and demand more imagination from the viewer to recognize the forest within them. Though they have a completely different effect, the drawings fundamentally reflect Zehetbauer-Salzer’s painterly approach. Again, the focus is on grasping essential structures — only here, in linear form. Zehetbauer-Salzer works his way from a tangle of lines to those few strokes that, with concentrated clarity, express what the many tried to say. In their intensity of color and impulsive brushwork, the drawings recall the early paintings, but through careful reduction and focus on the essence, he succeeds in saying more with less. The simultaneous presence of impulsiveness and concentration results in powerful, harmonious images that balance between horror vacui and tabula rasa.
Ultimately, in his paintings, Guido Zehetbauer-Salzer translates what nature, at its best, can teach us as humans: to focus on what is essential, to perceive the here and now, and to recognize and savor the richness of the moment."
Excerpts from the text; the full version can be found in the catalog “Guido Zehetbauer-Salzer, Homage to the Forest” (2020).
In his sculptural works, Zehetbauer-Salzer dispenses with color altogether. Here, his focus lies solely on form. These are three-dimensional drawings made from thin wire lines — tributes to nature.
Link to the works presented at the exhibition