City Life
It has become a cliché to say that a contemporary artist offers his audience a “different way of seeing.” However, I had a revelation recently when walking through Manhattan: Gottfried Salzmann’s art has indeed changed the way I look at the modern metropolis. 
His paintings capture the diversity and vigor of the urban landscape, its progress and development. Salzmann thrives on the challenge of revealing the architectural megalomania of our cities with his brush. He achieves especially forceful effects as he paints the urban canyons winding between buildings, accentuating their sheerness by the use of an extremely high point of view. As spectators on the ground, we look up at the walls of these canyons feeling small, yet reveling in our achievement at having created such magnificent structures of steel.Today’s urban sites are progressively supplanting rural landscapes and although we sometimes long for the pastoral, we are loath to leave our protective wombs of concrete and glass. In Salzmann’s work there is always this dichotomy between rural landscapes where brown fields, green swales, and blue water merge and flow around each other, and the sharp-edged verticality of the urban cliffs that surround us as we rush through busy streets. His skyscrapers are structured landscapes, like the huge stone megaliths of Europe. As the sun moves, the shadows of these giant dolmens follow.
I suspect that those of you who have seen and experienced the paintings of Gottfried Salzmann agree with me that he indeed has the ability to make us see differently and we have all been affected by his perspective and compositions. The buildings that we previously walked by indifferently we now see as constructions worthy of our attention and a closer look. Salzmann’s paintings of the city capture an inherent beauty that we once missed entirely, gothic towers that fragment views into slivers of sight and reflected chasms of light. He allows us to absorb the city with fresh eyes – its verticality, its atmosphere, the flash of yellow cabs always in motion, the bend of a reflection as it wraps around a window. Salzmann’s love of the city is apparent in every line he draws. As he has said: “New York is a city that has given me a lot and I always go back with pleasure.”
“Salzmann’s paintings are a homage to the sense of sight.”
Bernard Bled, the Director General of the Public Establishment in Paris for the development of La Défense perceived that Salzmann’s thematic work with cityscapes uniquely qualified him to be the featured artist for the inaugural exhibition at Espace Raymond Moretti. This space, which was opened in the newly renovated La Défense region of Paris, is now the heart of a much larger urban renewal project conceived as a way to bring art and culture to an area of the city where it was sorely lacking. In Austria, the city of Linz was named the cultural city of Europe for 2009 and to celebrate this honor, The Lentos Kunst Museum sponsored an exhibition titled, Best of Austria, in January 2009. To mount a show worthy of its new status, the city asked for loans from the great museums of Austria as well as from the best corporate and private collections. The response was enthusiastic and an exceptional body of 100 works was chosen. In an unusual method of selection, each participating institution was given the freedom to choose the three works which they felt were the best Austrian works of art in their holdings. The works chosen feature different styles and span several centuries. For this exhibition the Salzburger Museum chose an exceptional early watercolor by Salzmann, one of his reflections of the Rouen cathedral in Normandy. During the exhibition Salzmann’s work hung in the company of such Austrian luminaries as Egon Schiele, Xavier Messerschmidt and Gustav Klimt. The exhibition highlighted the rich cultural heritage and fine arts traditions of the entire country of Austria and was accompanied by a beautiful catalog to memorialize the event.
To celebrate its 175th anniversary, the Salzburg Museum is holding a major exhibition of paintings, watercolors and drawings with views of Salzburg covering the past five centuries. This exhibition not only
spans an arc of art history from the Renaissance to the contemporary period, it also spotlights Salzburg’s multifaceted development from a small medieval town into the city of today. Art works in the exhibition were chosen exclusively from the Salzburg Museum’s extensive painting and graphics collection, most of which are very rare or have never been shown before and many that were recently acquired for the museum. Accompanying the exhibition is a book with 250 illustrations. Salzburg has been a subject for painters and graphic artists’ innumerable times, ever since the first pictorial view of Salzburg appeared in the Schedel World Chronicle of 1493. The city has inspired works by many great artists, as well as many others who remain unknown. A beautiful acrylic and photo painting by Gottfried Salzmann, Salzburg aus der Flugperspektive, was chosen for the exhibit and this same piece was also selected for the museum invitation and the exhibition posters that will be displayed throughout the city until the close of the show in June 2009.Gottfried has taken his skill as a watercolorist and pushed it further than probably any other artist working in the medium today. Even his forays into other mediums and methods bear the hallmark influence of his watercolor brush. As his public, we should be grateful at how he has opened our eyes. As Nikolaus Schaffer so astutely noted in his 2006 monograph on the artist,“Salzmann’s paintings are a homage to the sense of sight.” I am thrilled that his abilities are now being recognized by so many in the art world, and am pleased to present this new collection by Gottfried Salzmann, a man whose life’s journey has emerged from an authentic aesthetic and an approach to art that rejects all compromise.