Austrian artist, Martin C. Herbst (*1965), pushes the limits of traditional painting. His recent works expand to the third dimension and produce fascinating in-betweens. The New York based Regis Krampf Gallery showed examples in this year’s edition of Contemporary Istanbul. Faces appeared on concave dishes, curved plates or stainless steel spheres and offered stunning experiences: the faces are distorted when painted on curved panels, but look “normal” if the viewer betrays from a certain point of view. Concave aluminum dishes seem to suck the faces to the center. Faces on spheres look like caged moon-faces and show different expressions when the sphere is turned. Herbsts paintings show a truly new approach to representation and are deeply based in the long tradition of painting at the same time. In fact he focuses in his work on an elaborate re-imagining of art historical themes and theories of classical portraiture and human figure. Especially the well-known sphere-series is a good example. These faces painted on stainless steel spheres were inspired by a famous painting of the Italian Mannerism, Parmigianino’s “Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror” (c.1524). The small painting on a curved wooden plate shows the painter himself sitting behind a table and is famous for showing all the distortions, which a convex mirror produces. Expanding Parmigianino’s idea Herbst uses highly polished stainless steel spheres and paints a face on one half . The other half of the sphere remains unpainted and functions as a massive distorting mirror. Surprising is not only the distortion of the painted face, but also the fact that the expression of the face seems to change a bit if you turn the sphere and look at it from a different point of view. Painting and reality mixes and the work appears strangely animated and vivid. Martin C. Herbst (*1965) has exhibited intensively around the globe, recent solo shows include Christopher Cutts Gallery Toronto;Mike Weiss Gallery NYC; Várfok Galéria Budapest; MITO, Barcelona. Fair participations include Art Basel Miami; Scope New York, Basel, Miami, Hamptons, London; Art Chicago; Los Angeles Art Show, Artbo, Bogota; Show off, Paris; Art Brussels; ArteBa, Buenos Aires and others.