Under the title China, Ángel Marcos (Medina del Campo, Valladolid, 1955) rounds off a trilogy he began six years earlier in New York and continued in Havana in 2004. Though the locations are entirely different, the images revolve around the same conceptual parameter: the conversation between the city’s population and the powers that govern it through advertising and propaganda. Exploring both the city centres and the suburbs of Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, the artist captures the contrast between past and present, tradition and modernity through publicity, contrasting architectures and the clash of metropolitan landscapes. The result is a broad-reaching project that includes photography and video; a window onto Angel Marcos’ personal take on today’s China.

Oliver Dorfer (b. 1963 in Linz, Austria) Oliver Dorfer presents a position within the Austrian contemporary art, which connects the motif-orientated language of pictures of the 1980th with a high sensibility for optical systems of current artistic forms of appearances. He works on the tension between universal validity of the simplest story and the complex interleave of signs of our "pic-media-society". His new works show few recurring motives, which form logos, icons and piktograms, and create his distinctive visual language. Although he works traditional with brush and acryl on plastic, he talks about his paintings as "pics" or "visuals" and refers with his picture series in comic style on narations of comics, pop und trash.

Andy Warhol (b. 1928 Pittsburgh, USA) Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1928. In 1945 he entered the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) where he majored in pictorial design. Upon graduation, Warhol moved to New York where he found steady work as a commercial artist. Throughout the 1950s, Warhol enjoyed a successful career as a commercial artist, winning several commendations from the Art Director's Club and the American Institute of Graphic Arts. In these early years, he shortened his name to "Warhol". The 1960s was an extremely prolific decade for Warhol. Appropriating images from popular culture, Warhol created many paintings that remain icons of 20th-century art, such as the Campbell's Soup Cans, Disasters and Marilyns. At the start of the 1970s, Warhol began publishing Interview magazine and renewed his focus on painting. Andy Warhol died February 22, 1987.The Andy Warhol Museum opened in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in May 1994.

Dust Storms
During the research phase for a recent series titled "Smoke Trees" I investigated phenomena such as explosions, storms and clouds to assist in representing foliage as carbon cloud. Frequently during this research I came across archival imagery from the Dust Bowl storms of the 1930's and was struck by them. The vast dust filled weather fronts moving across the plains were visually reminiscent of both apocalyptic biblical tales and contemporary cinematic sources. From those images I began to develop the concept of 'storm as sculpture' and for these to function as sort of memorial for an ongoing reality, a memorial for the now or perhaps the soon to come. There is a strong environmental theme in my work more generally and the origins of the dust storms, in the petroleum fuelled mass destruction of US grasslands through ploughing seemed like an appropriate reference for these times.

The photographer Massimo Vitali was born in Como in 1944 and studied photography in Milan and London. He has been working exclusively in photography for 25 years. In the focus of Massimo Vitali’s artistic interest stands the social ongoing at places of leisure and consumerism. Till the shoot he dwells for a while on a platform of 4 to 5 metres high so that the mugged people look as if they are unaware of the presence of the camera. On the brink of voyeurism his photos show reality without any beautification by a revision. In its simple and straight way of representation the viewer is confronted with crowded beaches, densely populated discos, shopping centres, leisure parks and supermarkets on enormous photos. They are unmistakable, detailed event-photos which show the influences of his long lasting work as a photographer as well as they bear resemblances to history painting.