In Venice, Mader finds the ideal scenery for his concept of painting. With extraordinary sensitivity, these works portray the light in a city where the interplay of water, architecture and atmosphere creates a unique situation. For Mader, the paintings of William Turner are one of his key points of reference; after all, it was Turner who first transcended the reality of La Serenissima and bathed its canals and walls in dramatic light. Like Turner, Mader doesn’t see Venice as merely picturesque, instead finding the light-saturated water and shimmering haziness of the city. Mader’s paintings make him a “legitimate successor to the great painters who immortalized Venice in the collective memory of humanity: as mood and emotion, as memory and hope, as a spiritual experience.” (Klaus Albrecht Schröder)

Alongside Venice, New York is a central star in Heribert Mader’s artistic cosmos. He believes that “Manhattan itself is a work of art”, and on each visit tries tirelessly to commit an overwhelming number of impressions to memory or capture them on camera. In his paintings, the deep chasms of the streets lead in perspective into light-flooded backgrounds. A virtuoso creator of scenes, he uses rhythmic structures to enhance the charisma of gigantic facades.

Each city has many different faces. Venice and New York, Vienna, London and Paris – in their diversity, all these metropolises are eye-catching locations for Mader’s artistic research. In his personal homage to each city we can see them as organisms, as artistic sources of friction, as places of inspiration. They also offer aesthetic insights: while his oil paintings capture the imagination with their suggestive constructions of perspective and pastose surfaces, his watercolours are enthralling in the delicate transparency of their colours.

As well as numerous exhibitions and awards, Heribert Mader’s success is clearly shown by the many acquisitions of his work for private and public collections. Today, his works are on display in galleries such as the Albertina, the Leopold Museum in Vienna, the Artothek in Vienna, the state museums of Upper and Lower Austria, the Angerlehner Museum, the Municipal Museum in Bruneck/Brunico, and the Salzburg Museum.