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Austrian artist Lorenz Estermann, born in 1968 in Linz, is a painter, draftsman, typographer, photographer and before all collage artist. He was a master-class pupil of Ernst Caramelle at the College for Applied Art in Vienna, whose perception theory has influenced him. By the searches of his European travelling he collects places, situations and buildings. He takes photos and puts them into his archives of pictures. On this base he creates complicated collages with different methods. He paints and creates partly spatially structures, up to space models. From the photographic presentation something new originates, more than an effigy. The torn out architecture motives are emptied virtually methodically of the sense, are reduced almost to absurdity. They are descended mostly from not very homey suburbs and industrial zones in Central Europe and East Europe. Often he shows given up buildings, quite fallen into oblivion, which had lost their purpose relatively short time after their origin. The "Künstlichkeit" of the living spaces of the western civilization are thereby properly exposed into distortion. Utopias of the modern architecture are so documented, analyzed and also caricatured. A sort of perception work is thereby performed for the viewer which should lead him to a question: Can ideal images, the dream of Utopia, be built in the real world generally? Remain, maybe, only souvenirs? Lorenz Estermann gives no valid answer with his works, but he puts a valid question to the viewer

Lorenz Estermann lives and works in Linz, Vienna and Berlin. Since 2010 he is a lecturer at the advanced technical college (FH) of Bielefeld.