Otto Zitko
In Times Like These 

Although the lines are condensing, their gestural quality and the performative act of the creation process remain visible. The color bands inscribe themselves immediately onto the pictorial ground—spontaneous and without corrections. The physicality of the artist is recorded and made visible in the network of lines. Zitko’s works thus become a mirror of external and internal movements, a reflection of the artist’s personality as a sensing and perceiving individual. As metaphors of a reflected subject-world, they address existential as well as personal questions. Similar to a seismograph, they record the physical and mental condition of the artist and directly reflect his moods and observations. They become a memory of the past weeks, as Zitko experienced, felt, and perceived them.

This is also true for the self-portrait, which additionally lets the artist’s presence become visible – begging the question whether this is evoked more by the motif of the face or the gesture of the line. Having started it in 2000, Zitko returned to it now, twenty years later, and completed it. With its fine, black lines, the work refers back to the art production of the past decades, thus connecting different work periods in terms of content and style. Drawn with an oil crayon, the lines incessantly circle across the surface, in their center birthing a face with wide open eyes. The self-portrait shows the artist behind a sort of window that distances him from the viewer. It emblematically stands for the upheavals of the past weeks that were caused by retreat and isolation. At the same time, however, it also stands for the creative potential of this distance. It serves as a symbol of the working method of the artist, who perceives the happenings of the world as an external observer, translates them immediately into his graphic language, and thereby conserves them forever.