No one wants to start right off with the crisis, not again. Don’t worry, that can wait until page 50. What does the financial crisis mean for art? Is there a reason for the art market to complain? The answer is no, according to our market researcher Werner Rodlauer.

This positive view sets a good mood for the start to an eventful and exciting year with EIKON. In this issue’s five artist portraits, we once again present the variety of the landscape of photography and media art, showing that art in itself knows no crisis. Spanish-French artist ANNA MALAGRIDA directs her gaze on views through spatial settings, on windows, which above all signify an opening to the world. Her usually “veiled” images play with our perception of outside and inside and poetically explore the alternation between reality and illusion. KAMEN STOYANOV, recently honored with the Msgr. Otto Mauer Preis, also reflects realities in his art. His (video) works explore the relationship between high art and everyday culture, looking at art’s social, economic, and cultural conditions. STÉPHANE COUTURIER’s large format photography presents architectural landscapes, segments of the built in states of transition, seeking to evoke the desired representation of the uncanny space between reality and imagination by way of highly subtle interventions. For MARKUS GUSCHELBAUER the natural landscape forms the focus of his artistic interest. He rearranges it, cloaking trees and wild brooks in plastic, hiding or defamiliarizing them, or quotes art history, all (perhaps) to clarify restrictions and create a new idea of beauty. In the work of URSULA HENTSCHLÄGER nature also plays a role. Here, it serves as a performer, bringing the level of visual communication into a relation with the level of linguistic communication. The artist seeks to expose the multilayered surfaces of perception that form our reality.

This issue also features an interview with Monika Faber on her remarkable Photoinstitut Bonartes, a tour through some of the most important recent exhibitions—from Ai Weiwei to Cindy Sherman to “Weegee the Famous”—as well as hits from the book market.