There is a trend in music that is identified as “New Folk”. Its protagonists are mainly from the English-speaking world. They sing with thin voices and use instruments that can not be bought at any music shop to generate squeaky sounds, or they let a sheep bleat as the intro to a song. It has an amateurish effect: At first, one fears the exposure of an error, a failed attempt at pathos. Bearded men in women’s clothes, women who worship their mothers and queers who complain of death as an injustice become allies.

Music and art benefit from this off-kilter movement, it shows a new confidence in the simple, yet intensive “LoFi” sets as a countermovement to the usual blend. The mass production of glossy images meanwhile indulges itself in misogynistic stereotypes of music video aesthetics, in which men as well as women are converted into sex machines devoted to consumption.
The images that are in demand however, are images and songs that are linked to the shattering beauty of a cheerful, sensuous atmosphere of respect and love. Alluring images that piece together the right fragments of the imperfect. Images that modify so-called good taste and thereby come closer to the reality of life.

In this exhibition various experiments are undertaken to demonstrate reality. It is not about what is “new” in art, it is about movement, action, confidence that is free from trendy cynicism.
Hence the naive, childlike, mischievous, immature program – a response to the ready-to-compromise adult world that has established itself in the reality of an enlightened, unhappy fatalism. Thus images are born that propose a conundrum about their own sense and intent. Like a haiku, which Roland Barthes described as the gesture of a small child pointing to all sorts of things. We take ourselves on a search for images that are as senseless as a haiku…

In the exhibition “New Folks”, there will be works to see that trigger formal and content-related associations like immediacy, rawness, wit, mischief, tenderness, optimism and melancholy, opening, exposure. The majority of these works draw their charm from a homage to imperfection, lunacy and the enigmatic, from the fairytale-like and the lucid.

Many of the participating artists are not only painters or graphic artists, but they also compose music, write and perform. Some are already established and familiar, others are only now developing their work. Many of them come from the environment of the painting class of the Art University in Linz.
Every generation has “predecessors” who, through their artistic work, have provided influence, impulses. In this manner, this exhibition also attempts to trace connections. Perhaps the younger artists have not even seen the works of the elders; but perhaps they have admired these very musicians or film makers, artists considered important, who conveyed a view of the world that is similar to their own.

It’s about attitudes.

Let’s dance!