Sebi Schager (AT) – Away, Away (Plain Paper)

Sebi works across spray stencils, robotic pen drawing, gold leaf, and digital collage. His practice moves between appropriation and reinvention — art-historical imagery taken apart, digitally recombined, then translated back into physical form through plotters, stencils, and direct painting. Gold meets street, canon meets intervention.

The Temporary Nostalgia series picks up a concept Sebi first explored during his time with PERFEKT WORLD — revisited and sharpened for 2025. VHS and DVD covers from the 1990s and 2000s are humorously altered and redesigned, the original layouts becoming raw material for something closer to painting than reproduction. The covers aren’t quoted — they’re used the way a painter uses pigment. Each of us connects something different to each movie, and that personal connection is what the work is about. Having a physical copy on the shelf was never just about the film inside. It was an artifact — something to take out, hold, reread the back of for the tenth time. Streaming killed the plastic and freed the shelf space, but it took the object with it. The title says it all: the nostalgia is temporary, but while you held that cassette, it was real. Text is twisted and played with, and little characters from the Fun Frens NFT series wander through the compositions — the same figures that populate many of the digital collages in The Trip Drop and The Fun Drop. The entire series was live printed during the Affordable Art Fair Vienna 2025.

Away, Away — Spirited Away, Cast Away, and everything in between that promises departure: Terminator, Piranha, Moana, Platoon, Planet of the Apes, Independence Day, Peter Pan. The doubled word is in the titles themselves. A shelf full of exits — every Friday night was a choice of where to disappear to, and the walk back to the store on Monday was its own small ritual.

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About the artist