Concept & Philosophy

Harald Grünauer’s works emerge from a conception of the world in which space, time, and consciousness are inextricably intertwined. His drawings, paintings, and immersive works are not illustrations of theories but independent spaces of thought and experience. One can sense that they have grown from a long-standing engagement with quantum physics, general relativity, and the psychology of perception – yet they function even if one knows not a single technical term from physics.

At the center stands a simple but radical question: What does it feel like to live in a world where spacetime is curved, where particles are entangled over infinite distances, and where a large part of matter remains invisible? Grünauer answers this question not with diagrams or formulas, but with lines, fields, and layers of color. His pictorial spaces act like sections of a larger structure in which past, present, and possible futures merge. Often, one has the feeling of looking less at a single image than into a system of forces and movements.

Series such as Time Machine, Dark Matter, When Black Holes Got Colors, or Panoramic View – Looking for Unknown Dimensions can be read as different chapters of the same artistic research. In the Time Machines, lines and forms condense into vortices, trajectories, and nested zones that recall orbits, fields, or overlapping planes of time. Here, Einstein’s idea of spacetime emerges pictorially: nothing is fixed, nothing is purely static; every form seems to be deflected, pulled, or deformed by something invisible. The images convey the impression that we are in a structure where space and time are constantly renegotiated – and where one's own body is just one traveler among many.

The engagement with quantum physics manifests elsewhere in an almost paradoxical gesture: Grünauer does not attempt to 'explain' the incomprehensible, but to take the state of not understanding seriously and make it aesthetically fruitful. He translates terms like quantum entanglement – the 'spooky' connection between two particles across any distance – into pictorial spaces where forms appear simultaneously separated and connected. Network-like structures, repetitions, reflections, and shifts create the feeling that something in the image is 'speaking to each other' without one being able to say exactly what. They are images suggesting that everything is linked to everything else, even if these connections remain withdrawn from our senses.

Similarly with the fascination for Dark Matter. In works dedicated to this theme, animated color zones, vibrating lines, and pulsating points stand next to seemingly empty, dark areas. But it quickly becomes clear: emptiness here is never truly empty. The dark, the undrawn, carries its own tension. The visible elements seem to orient themselves around it, held by invisible fields or thrown off their course. The physical fact that the majority of the universe consists of something we cannot see directly, but only perceive through its effects, is reflected in a pictorial logic where the invisible is the driving force.

Essential to Grünauer’s practice is also the way his works are created. Many of the large-format drawings are built up layer by layer over months. Automatic, intuitive passages alternate with highly concentrated, controlled placements. This ping-pong between control and letting go reflects not only an attitude towards work but also an attitude towards the world: We constantly move between what we can plan and calculate and what slips away from us. In this sense, the images are not only commentaries on physical theories but also on our psychological everyday life in a complex reality.

Another decisive aspect is the physical experience of the viewer. Many works by Harald Grünauer only unfold their effect in space when one stands opposite them, approaches them, steps back again, lets one's own eyes 'wander' along the lines. Panoramic formats or oversized drawing fields draw the gaze in until the usual orientation points are missing. There is no classic foreground, no clear horizon, no simple center. Instead, one's own perceptual apparatus – eyes, balance, attention – becomes the actual stage. In this moment, physical theory and physiological reality intertwine: The body feels what the theory asserts – that space is relative, that perspective deceives, that stability is often just a convention.

Grünauer’s work is thus also a school of wonder. It combines scientific curiosity with an inner world of images without playing one against the other. Whoever looks at his works does not need to be able to solve a relativity equation. It is enough to engage with seeing – with the superimpositions, the layerings, the vibrating interstices. That a keen interest in quantum physics, general relativity, and perceptual psychology lies behind these images can be sensed between the lines. But precisely because knowledge is not ostensibly exhibited, something else can set in: the feeling of being part of a larger context for a moment, in which art, body, and cosmos react to one another.

In this connection of precision and openness, of scientific allusion and poetic freedom, lies the special quality of Harald Grünauer’s practice. His works are not illustrations of physics but independent spaces of experience in which questions of space, time, and consciousness are artistically condensed. They invite one to understand oneself as part of a complex, pulsating structure – as an observer, as a body in space, and as a thinker who lets oneself be transported by lines, colors, and forms into other states of perception.