Contemporary basic artistic principles are significantly influenced by an opening of the boundaries between the various forms of media. This opening is reflected in the interdisciplinary foundation course Painting and Graphic Art. The identity of the academy combines with the international reputation of high-quality artistic teaching, where the traditional values of figurative painting and drawing and illustration are complemented by forward-looking, media-flexible teaching content in the fields of media art, photography, film and animation.
In the foundation course Painting / Graphic Art we operate on the assumption that this interdisciplinarity in the various courses fundamentally encourages the approach of free art, it does not exclude but rather promotes and encourages the specifics and independence of the individual disciplines individually; therefore interdisciplinarity requires media-specific and specialist knowledge.
At the beginning of the course, students of our specialist discipline are provided with guidance which should facilitate the path towards making their own flexible artistic decisions. The greatest possible certainty and familiarity with the spectrum of painting and graphic art is conveyed through a practical diversity of topics and tasks from the fields of graphic and artistic study of nature, anatomy, theory of colours, painting technique, free composition, drawing and the printing techniques etching, woodcutting, lithography and silk-screen printing. In order to be capable of creating something new in the future as an independent visual artist, our students are acquainted in the most intensive and comprehensive manner with the tradition of artistic creativity up to the present day.
The key areas of the basic principles, in other words the shared learning of how to view things, our world, nature and its processes and their poetic transformation into the visual form is not merely an educational teaching programme for us but rather the active support of each individual. Applied art history and the advancement of your own ability in creative acquisition are prerequisites in order to transform the artistic articulation into an independent form and contentual intention. Through drawing and painting exercises, cautiously approaching your own world of imagery, joint tasks for the concept of the image, what is important and is worth being painted or drawn, confidence and experiences emerge which are not only valuable for further study in the specialist classes but also for your own art.