Provenance:
- Galerie Georg Kargl, Vienna.
- Private collection Switzerland.

Originally from Graz, the artist Gabi Trinkhaus lives and works in Vienna. Well known in Austria, she exhibits throughout Europe and also in the United States. She is known for her large format collages made of newspaper scraps. Her material comes from advertising and especially glossy magazines. Using this material she develops new images, with portraits and cityscapes dominating her oeuvre.

She cuts the newspapers into small pieces which are virtually the colour required. On the canvas she then arranges them into pictures. She thus creates beings and hybrid places which look perfect. Mankind is almost always at the centre of her reflections and is her most popular theme. The underlying principle of her work is the perfect aesthetics of the media. As you approach her works, you quickly see that behind the perfect façade, numerous bits of paper rubbish are hidden: fragments of text, advertisements for luxury goods or labels. The perfection is just an illusion, a deception.

Recurring questions in her work are ideas of ideal beauty, identity, and social roles that we play, but also questions about consumption and superficiality. Trinkhaus shows to great effect that nothing is as it seems at first glance. What is important is often under the surface. She criticises the blindness of our society today, which concerns itself only with surface and what is external.

The work presented here provides a perfect summing up of her ideas. At first sight this seems to be the beautiful face of a woman, but when we observe more closely, what we discover are various bits of paper, which is so typical of her work.