Created in 1972-73 during a British Council scholarship at the Slade School in London, the paintings of the series „Kalte Strahlung“ (Cold Radiation) belong to Robert Lettner’s overarching series „Anarchy“. In this series, Lettner primarily used fragments of pictorial motifs taken from print media. Filmic and photographic reproduction techniques, the „sensuality“ of political mass printed matter, the image production of the Paris May 1968 and the student movement were among the materials that Robert Lettner used at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, in a kind of „dialectical reproduction process“ to create an idea of realistic painting adapted to the circumstances of the time. Another programmatic aspect was the use of modern industrial painting tools (spraying techniques/“airbrush“), which allowed the canvas paintings to be given the optical effects of the printing technique in additive color mixtures and thus the sensual impression of an environment characterized by commodity aesthetics. In the combination of photographic imaging techniques and the expression of hand painting, Lettner saw a possibility to convey reality upholding the tension of its contradictions emotionality/rationality, subjectivity/objectivity, individual/society. In his contribution to the catalog of the 1990 exhibition “Kalte Strahlung” by Robert Lettner and Adam Jankowski at the Museum Moderner Kunst Vienna, Werner Hofmann, its founding director, points to the “segmented realities” we encounter everywhere and speaks of a “realism that confronts the refractions into which our perceptual grids break down.” (From Harald Krämer, Robert Lettner. Das Spiel vom Kommen und Gehen, Klagenfurt 2018, pp. 14-17, abridged and summarized).