Congratulation! Vienna based artist Susi Krautgartner is one of the laureates of "Roter Teppich für junge Kunst" 2012. She has been assistant to several courses in the Summer Academy during the last years. This year, she will assist to Matts Leiderstam's course "Self-portrait". TONIGHT, there is the opening of her solo exhibition "Körperdoubles" in the Bildungszentrum in Vienna.

Milena Dragicevic writes in her description for her course FORM FATALE "Painting is difficult, but the form it takes creates our positions as artists. It is these positions which allow us to jump into the abyss, only to resurface again. "This is where our year's motto comes from. In Milena's course you will shed old habits in order to develop a focus for the production of new ideas and approaches. Hanspeter Hofmann in his course HOW TO PAINT pursues a more scientific approach to art. In his course the focus will be on conceptional considerations and on research on diverse artistic practices.

The social life of jewellery: Lin Cheung invites you to pay attention to what the mind and senses notice while treating jewellery as a social phenomenon. Her own work is on view at Galerie Sofie Lachaert in Tielrode, Belgium until April 8. To give you a foretaste, here is a documentation of her course at last year's summer academy.
The South African photographer Jo Ractliffe will focus on the tension between photography's documentary status and its fictive capacities. Until May 13, Ractliffe's work series "As Terras do Fim do Mundo" is included in the group exhibition "Appropriated Landscapes" at the Walther Collection in Neu-Ulm/Burlafingen, Germany.

Today, stone sculpture is rarely taught in the academies. But Susanne Tunn is well known for her intense stone sculpture symposiums in the Kiefer quarry in Fürstenbrunn, at the foot of the Untersberg. This year, she will teach together with Norwegian stone sculptor Hagbart Solløs. While exploring the possibilities and limitations of working with stone, you will improve your artistic expression. Also in Martin Schmidl's course "The practice of drawing" you will test your limits. Confrontation of one's own strengths and weaknesses and orientation within the context of contemporary art will be focal points. Schmidl works in the fields of drawing, conceptual art and research into aesthetics and art history, and since the 1990s, he has taught at various academies of art.

Painting or printing? Which kind of technique do you prefer? Krystyna Piotrowska, printmaker, photographer, installation and video artist and curator from Warsaw, will teach her students in diverse and unusual printing techniques, like shellac technique or collography, to broaden their expressiveness. Filmmaker, painter and performance artist Mara Mattuschka from Vienna will focus on an emotional, psycho-active or even ecstatic kind of painting, based on figurative style. Her course "Painted light" will help to overcome stereotypes and to find one's own elemental picture.