TAPETI

A Day before a Day, March 2005

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The uncontested signaling effect of the color red is also a fascinating element about Jean-Pascal Flavien’s drawings. It would not suffice to see them as mere studies for his installations. The artist himself characterizes his drawings as means of perceiving and creating spaces.

The landscapes in the drawings describe the objects’ surroundings and, on the basis of an archival visual memory, open the beholder’s mind for territory yet to be discovered. The motifs – craters, oversized thistle plants, and, most important, dinosaurs exploring the scenery – seem to derive from a natural history course. However, it would be foreign to the artist’s nature to directly refer to certain epochs, let alone events. The strong naturalism determining the formal realizations of his borrowings from paleontology should not be confused with a love of realism. Rather, the treacherous visibility of this type of nature leaves the invisible to be revealed.

A plant, a camera, pigeon of chaos, trapped spirits, a terrazzo of time (for “A Future Adaptation of Giselle”)

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A Future Adaptation of Giselle: with the subtitle of the wallpaper, C.B. Evans explicitly references their long-term, multipart project. In this body of work, the artist engages in a contemporary, speculative reinterpretation of the classical ballet Giselle, first premiered in Paris in 1841. Regarded as a milestone of Romanticism, the ballet established technical standards for classical dance and shaped enduring ideals of female protagonists on the theatrical stage.

In Evans’ adaptation, which encompasses films, installations, performative formats, and objects, this canon is radically reconfigured: Giselle becomes a feminist thriller set in a future shaped by climate crisis, ecological transformation, and migration. The project examines states of transition, processes of adaptation, and relationships between human and nonhuman actors.

About

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With the advent of Modernism, space is reduced to background, turning neutral, silent, almost invisible. The “White Cube” was the plain stage set for an art seeking to rid itself of ornament and décor. Contemporaneously, the 20th century saw the emergence of pavilion-style architectures with glass facades that let views unfold and interior and exterior flow into one another.

The museum in Skopje also shows such architectural characteristics of Modernism, as does the EVN Headquarters in Maria Enzersdorf near Vienna, Austria. For the stairwell of the Austrian building from the 1960s, an exceptional concept, launched in 2018, was developed: Artists were commissioned to create purpose-designed wallpapers for various walls, creating islands for exhibits of selected works from the evn collection. The collection, in existence since 1995 and curated by the collection’s Art Advisory Board, places its focus on international contemporary art.

Adjarian Bride

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Andante

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Dimo Todorovski, who was born in Thessaloniki in 1910 and lived and worked in Skopje, was the first academically trained Macedonian sculptor. Unfortunately, many of his sculptures from before World War II were destroyed. In addition to his works with social themes, Dimo Todorovski created numerous sculptures in plaster and bronze, as well as several public monuments throughout Macedonia.

The work “Andante,” at nearly life-size, depicts a seated male figure playing the cello, an evocative gesture that gives it psychological depth and a sense of duration. This scene stems from the artist’s personal experience, who modeled the figure from memory.

Attachements

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Andreas Reiter Raabe is an artist, curator, gallery owner, collector and interviewer. His approach to art is conceptual; he treats the subject of painting with a thorough knowledge of art history and a constant questioning of method and content. The works entitled Attachement have been created in various small formats since 1998. The title is deceptive, as these are not extensions, but primary objects: Andreas Reiter Raabe pours four colors (in earlier works, also synthetic resin) over the canvas in four directions. The paint drips from the work on the table onto a large canvas below. As a result, this too becomes a trace painting on its own. Thus, the Attachements represent the beginning of an artistic conceptual process. At their edges, one sees fine drops that reveal their horizontal creation process. The works long exceeded their function as an accessory; in combination with the wallpaper, they not only experience duplication, but also play with dimensions. They become eye deceptions, trompe-l’oeil, and captivate just as much with their fine aesthetics as with the simplicity of process.

Blue painting

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The Serbian painter Bogoljub Ivković was born in Gradsko, near Veles. He graduated from the School of Applied Arts in Skopje in 1953 and specialized in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1957. His paintings, which are characterized by surrealist, post-cubist, and expressionist traits, often depict rural settings inspired by folklore and usually have a curved horizon line. Bogoljub Ivković’s monumental, geometric figures express the difficult life and the burden carried by Macedonian peasants. The painting (circa 1966) is representative of his early Parisian period. During his decade in Paris, between 1965 and 1974, he developed and perfected his original, idiosyncratic artistic style, which exists in the realm of the fantastic and the poetic. This small-format painting depicts a human figure against a black-brown background. The figure’s arms are positioned diagonally, as if mid-flight, and the entire body is reduced to basic geometric shapes.

Blue Spatiel Segments

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The Dutch artist Franck Gribling is considered one of the leading figures in postwar art in the Netherlands. Active since the 1950s, he was involved in the Informel art movement, the Dutch Nul movement (similar to the Zero movement), and later in Minimal and Concept Art. In his work, he combines painting, object art, and installation with a consistent focus on space, perception, and movement.

The work Blue Spatial Segments from the MoCA collection exemplifies this artistic approach. Through the use of Plexiglas and industrial automotive paint, Gribling demonstrates that transparency, reflection, and surface effects play central roles in his works. The smooth, reflective surface creates shifting visual impressions depending on the incidence of light and the viewer’s angle, transforming the work itself into a dynamic spatial entity.

Changed Materiality – 4 cubes – 2 identical joints

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The structure, consisting of four cuboids, is based on a principle of extreme formal reduction. All elements have an identical volume, the same proportions and the same surface texture. In fact, it consists of two interlocking pairs that interpenetrate and support one another. Part of the title (“2 identical joints”) refers to this structure of duplication, to two identical connections, joints or angles that organise the entire structure.

Two of the cuboids are positioned vertically and rest on their square end faces. The other two lie horizontally and are each offset by ninety degrees from one another, so that they point in different directions. The vertical elements each share an edge with the horizontal ones, creating an immediate, seamless connection. Despite their geometric rigour, this generates a dynamic that guides the viewer’s gaze along the edges, directions and intersections.

The surface is finished in a greyish off-white. Although the material initially brings to mind marble, it is in fact metal that has subsequently been whitewashed. The difference between actual materiality and visual appearance is not insignificant. The work oscillates between heaviness and lightness, between industrial construction and the classical conception of sculpture and proportion. The white whitewash neutralises the material character of the metal and draws attention to the relationships between the volumes.

Companionship 2057

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Yet there is something rather eerie about these figures by Sandra Mujinga. Alien, otherworldly—different. Monsters, avatars, cyborgs?

Sandra Mujinga’s anthropomorphic “Keepers” were on display in 2023 at the exhibition Going Dark at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. They were bathed in a fluorescent, toxic green. The composition of disembodied textile sculptures in endless light spoke of riddles, mystery, an alien presence, and unknown species.

When Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo adorned her 2017/18 collections for Comme des Garçons with lumps, bumps, and bulges that deformed and radically deconstructed the human body, she turned her back on classic silhouettes and subverted the idea of women as commodities.

Continuity in Red

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Karadare’s small-scale wooden figure is an exception within his body of work. The artist works primarily with traditional materials such as stone and bronze; his later works are mostly decorative and charmingly figurative.

The sculpture “Continuity in Red”, by contrast, appears significantly more expressive and seems more like a bozzetto—that is, a sketch for a large-scale monument. Its taut form, the dynamism of its lines, and its heightened expressiveness point to the artist’s more experimental phase in the early 1970s. A comparable example is Karadare’s monument to the revolutionary Goce Delčev in Strumica, which also displays an expressive, dynamic formal language. Perhaps the work was also created in the context of the exhibition the artist organized in 1973 together with two colleagues at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje.

Dalam 0209

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Simryn Gill works with found or selected objects in her sculptural works, as well as her photographic ones. These consist of series with a common theme. The shots of private rooms, which show architectural space as a background for the life that takes place within it, are particularly impressive. Due to the presence of furnishings and the user’s objects, the pictures produce discrete insight into the private sphere. In a series, these individual portraits become a description of a subcultural space that we Europeans would not recognise as being ours, but which enables us to recognise that globalisation brings standardisation of many areas with it – including the area of living. Simultaneously, there are regional variations crucial to the region’s identity.

Dance, Stanley, Dance, Stanley, Dance

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Marianna Simnett works in many disciplines: video art, performances, installations, sculptures, drawings. She often uses motifs of animals in her works and invents fable-like stories for these easily decipherable figures. Bodies are understood and used in Marianna Simnett’s works as possibilities for transformation.

In the spring of 2020, as the world began to become aware of the pandemic, she was inspired to create Dance, Stanley, Dance by a squirrel found on the side of the road during a walk in London. For the exhibition “Unforgotten Time” (5.6. – 30.8.2020) at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Stanley was revived as a watercolor, digitally animated and accompanied by a flute tune. In Maria Enzersdorf, Stanley dances in large format across two walls of the EVN headquater. The dynamics of his movements are clearly comprehensible. If for the exhibition in Bregenz Stanley was shown as a single figure, here we see him colorfully multiplied in the wallpaper. In multiplication, a wounded being has become part of a community.

Diver

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In his 1973 painting Diver, Italian artist Angelo Titonel subverts expectations of a classical portrait. Instead of emphasizing human individuality, he presents a monumental portrait of a mask. Oversized, sculptural diving goggles and a massive snorkel dominate the canvas. The actual face remains unrecognizable; it loses all personality and serves merely as a stand—like a wig stand—for the dominant apparatus.

In this painting, Titonel deliberately rejects any intimacy and instead imbues the everyday motif with a cool, architectural presence. With this detached stance, he turns away from the expressive forms of protest characteristic of older generations of artists and instead draws on the tradition of Italian Magic Realism (Realismo Magico).

Exhibition Views

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Expanding of One Surface – Interior

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This work, painted on wood, explores questions of visual illusion and the perspectival construction of space through painterly means. It depicts an interior space in which the ceiling and floor appear as monochromatic surfaces without further internal detailing: the ceiling in black, the floor in dark red. On either side, the space—which, due to its emptiness, is reminiscent of an exhibition setting or a theater stage—is bounded by two white walls. Their narrow sides, which simultaneously appear as openings, are illusionistically rendered with a black-and-white pattern, creating the impression is created that the walls are composed of different types of wood or materials. In the center of the background is a square toward which the entire composition converges. This vanishing point of the pictorial space, however, turns out to be an empty space. The square has been cut out of the wood panel and reveals the wall behind it. At the museum in Skopje, this can be experienced firsthand, as the coarser surface structure and texture of the whitewashed museum wall clearly differ from the homogeneously painted wooden surface.

The Cairo-born Greek painter Opy Zouni is classified as a geometric abstract artist. Her work revolves around the conditions of the pictorial space, architectural structures, optical effects, and spatial illusions. In Expanding of One Surface – Interior, she demonstrates how a two-dimensional surface (“one surface”) can be experienced as an architectural interior (“interior”) through lines, angles, and color composition.

f ist für …

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The edition f is for … by Jeremy Deller was created in 2023 to mark his exhibition WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT. Prints & Posters 1993–2023 at Kunstraum Franz-Josefs-Kai 3 in Vienna. The silkscreen print is a striking example of Deller’s democratic, cross-cultural approach, in which political stance, humor, and pop-cultural symbols converge.

The two-color silkscreen print reflects Deller’s longstanding practice of using posters and editions as a central artistic medium since the early 1990s. For him, prints are independent works that consciously position themselves at the intersection of art, music, politics, and everyday culture. Formally, the silkscreen print, with its minimalist, high-contrast design, draws on the aesthetics of woodcut prints. By combining an initial letter with a pictorial symbol, it simultaneously evokes associations with classic ABC books for children. This impression underscores the emphasis on legibility and circulation—central aspects of Deller’s understanding of art as a social medium.

Flesh

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The wallpaper by Hristina Ivanoska emerges from an artistic practice deeply rooted in historical narratives, political realities, and social inquiry. Ivanoska works across disciplines—drawing, text, textile, installation, performance, and video—continually examining how individual experience is embedded within broader social and political structures. She lives and works between Skopje and Berlin and has exhibited internationally, including at Manifesta 14, MAXXI in Rome, and the Künstlerhaus in Vienna.

This wallpaper refers to Ivanoska’s ongoing project Flesh into Blossom (2024–), conceptually provoked by her interest in the South Eastern European fairy figure, the Samovila, and Donna Haraway’s texts A Cyborg Manifesto and Staying with the Trouble. She reimagines the fairy through a contemporary lens as a speculative, hybrid being, reflecting on how this folkloric entity might be understood today as a kind of future cyborg—echoing Haraway’s idea that the cyborg emerges precisely where the boundaries between human and animal dissolve.

From the cycle “Notes”

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Simon Uzunovski was a central figure in the contemporary art scene in Skopje. Born in Belgrade, he studied architecture in Skopje and immersed himself in art history. His work spans painting, collage, installations, and performances, and he was particularly noted as a pioneer of participatory and conceptual art in the 1970s. A hallmark of his work is the use of simple materials such as adhesive tape or everyday objects, which he transformed into new contexts of meaning. In addition to his work in Skopje, Uzunovski also lived and worked for several years on the Italian island of Capri, where he earned a living as a street painter, selling primarily classic sunsets and similar tourist motifs.

Grabing of the Space

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Gligor Stefanov is one of the most prominent Macedonian artists since the early 1980s. Even after graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1981, the artist treated sculpture as a developed installation of objects. By the mid-1980s, he had created several installations and assemblages from cotton, straw, grass, clay, and wood, in both public and gallery spaces.

“Grabbing in Space” is one of the most significant works from the artist’s “Dragons” series (1984–1988). Its accumulated linear elements, made of straw, represent a claw-like hand in motion. Begun after Gligor Stefanov received his master’s degree in Belgrade in 1985, the work was first shown as part of his solo exhibition in 1986 at the MoCA Skopje. The success of the exhibition and the support from MoCA Skopje resulted in the artist being selected as the first representative of the Pavilion of the independent Republic of Macedonia at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993.

Herzl (III)

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In her multi-part series “Herzl”, Yael Bartana engages with the life of Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), author, journalist, politician, and lawyer. Born in Pest (now Budapest), Herzl is regarded as one of the most influential political figures of the 19th century. He served as a correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse in Paris, lived in Vienna for many years, and spent his vacations in the Salzkammergut region. He died 1904 in Edlach an der Rax, Lower Austria. His political vision and drive were dedicated to the Zionist movement and the founding of the State of Israel.

Through her engagement with this historical figure, the artist Yael Bartana raises questions about identity, power, and cultural memory. Her photographs are composed of archetypal elements—including clichés and stereotypical roles—and explore the deconstruction of political myths. In doing so, the artist herself presents in a statesmanlike pose in a classical portrait format. Bartana’s works operate in the space between reality and fiction, between personal appropriation and social critique. In reality, Herzl himself was never a statesman, nor an official representative of a government. Viewers are invited to reconsider the boundaries between history and the present. “My role as an artist is to open up the imagination in order to rethink history and the future.” (Yael Bartana, Der Standard, 5.12.2012)

Homage to the Black Power

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Joan Rabascall is a conceptual artist focused on the critical examination of mass media and the consumerist culture they promote. He was born in Barcelona and moved to Paris in 1962. Joan Rabascall’s artworks often combine found photography with images from magazines, television, and advertisements to achieve ironic shifts in meaning and offer social criticism and political commentary.

Along with fellow artists Antoni Miralda, Dorothee Selz and Jaume Xifra, Joan Rabascall worked in a collective inspired by the countercultural movements of the mid-twentieth century. Between 1969 and 1976, the group created a series of participatory performances and events. “Homage to Black Power” is a sculpture that represents the enormous, flattened form of a raised black fist holding delicate red flowers. As an anti-fascist white European artist, exiled to Paris from Franco’s Spain, Joan Rabascall expressed solidarity with the civil rights movement in the US. Today, one might legitimately question the appropriation of this symbol by a white artist, but we include it here as an image of another social and political moment in a specific time period. The first version of this work was installed in the gardens of the American Center in Paris in 1969.

Ich oder das Chaos (draft #1)

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The large-scale installation Ich oder das Chaos (Inv. No. 0312), created in 2018, is the first work by Franz Kapfer in the EVN headquarter. The artist, born in 1971 in Fürstenfeld, deals with symbols and structures of power in his work. The starting point of the work is ornamentation from a gate at the Louvre. The former royal palace was opened to the public as a museum in 1773 and further expanded under Napoleon Bonaparte. Franz Kapfer transfers Napoleonic symbols (lightning, bees, eagle, “N”) onto plywood panels and detaches them from the building as ornaments in a new context. As signs, they clarify the powerful visual representation of Bonaparte.

Ich oder das Chaos (draft #2)

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If Euer There Were Anye

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A subtly hued, metallic shimmer. The artist found this light reflection on a gray wall in her exhibition for the national gallery in Pristina in 2014. The colorful spot, about a half-meter in diameter, was an accidental reflection, a combination of sunlight and glass. The fleetingness of this moment, captured spontaneously on a cell phone, is brought, via the motif, from the south into the center of Europe. Flaka Haliti works with the possibilities of digital images, allowing emotions to emerge. Both analog and digital,they function on the same level.

Imprint

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EVN AG
EVN Platz
2344 Maria Enzersdorf, Austria
T. +43 2236 200 - 0
F. +43 2236 200 - 2030

EVN AG
Registered seat: Maria Enzersdorf
at: Landesgericht Wr. Neustadt
FN 72000 h. DVR: 0024341 UID Nr.: ATU 14 704505

© evn collection, 2026
© Texts: Authors and translators
© Works: Artists
© VBK, Vienna, 2009 for the artworks from: Sasha Auerbakh, Josef Bauer, John Bock, Jeremy Deller, VALIE EXPORT, Douglas Gordon, Manuel Gorkiewicz, Marguerite Humeau, Nicolas Jasmin, Anna Jermolaewa, Franz Kapfer; Christian Kosmas Mayer, Tabita Rezaire, Rudolf Stingel, Nora Turato, Maja Vukoje

Koko I

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In 2015 and 2016, Sarah Ortmeyer exhibited her confrontations with escapism and greed in three separate shows in New York, Paris, and Vienna. The “Palm Tree” in the evn collection is from her solo exhibition Koko Paradise at Belvedere 21 in Vienna. The sheets, painted in various shades of gray, negotiate the themes of climate catastrophe, economic constraints, and dependencies on the so-called “good life” in ways that are as simple as they are catchy. The Western world’s longing for exoticism, which has been channeled in the motif of a palm tree for centuries, finds its contemporary equivalent here.

Koudelka

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Insane Cancer (cell 1 and 2), Bruised Safes (A and B) and Koudelka form part of an ongoing collaboration between artists Jasper Spicero and Bunny Rogers entitled Random House. For Spicero, the project started “by playing early survival horror video games like Silent Hill, Clock Tower, Parasite Eve, Koudelka, The Mirror Lied and Juggernaut. At the same time as playing these games, I noticed that my favorite books were mostly published by Random House. From there, I started researching the company, making connections between early survival horror games and Random House, searching for midi files and collecting images online. Eventually, my research led to a story, sketches for sculpture and a soundtrack.”

Mirror

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Yannis Gaitis is considered one of the most important Greek painters of the 20th century. His early years in the political underground and his clandestine anti-fascist work during the 1940s left a deep mark on his life’s work. The period of active resistance shaped his view of authoritarian power structures, blind social obedience, and the steady erosion of individual freedom.

The work Mirrors (1977) marks Gaitis’s striking shift toward representational painting. He abandoned his early abstract approach in favor of a universally comprehensible, almost poster-like code. The repetitive, completely faceless figures in their striped suits and identical hats - his “Anthropakia” (little people)—strongly evoke, in their cool, serial, and flat depiction, the pictorial statistics (Isotype) of the Austrian sociologist Otto Neurath (1882–1945). As with Neurath, the human being becomes here, too, a standardized sign and a mere pictogram. Yet while Neurath is concerned with enlightenment, Gaitis seeks political critique. Mirrors reflects a completely alienated mass society in which the individual is lost in uniformity. The literally blank face of the overpowering blue main figure is filled with countless other, tiny clones, an oppressive metaphor for the compulsion to conform.

Modern Baroque

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The wallpaper Modern Baroque unfolds a multilayered aesthetic and conceptual tension. Uzunovski, whose work is characterized by an investigation of natural and perceptual phenomena and who places strong emphasis on the relationship between humans and their environment, positions his practice at the intersection of art, architecture, and ecological reflection. His artistic career is internationally visible: among other achievements, he participated in the 53rd Venice Biennale and is considered one of North Macedonia’s influential contemporary artists.

Modern Baroque draws on motifs that at first glance appear aesthetically appealing: marble-like structures reminiscent of classical and baroque architecture, as well as the ornamental, often symmetrical visual language of baroque garden design. These visual references to historical forms of representation create an atmosphere of ordered beauty and cultural refinement. Into this imagery, however, Uzunovski weaves a radical counter-motif: the photographic source material depicts a landfill in North Macedonia, a site of ecological strain and social reality. The wallpaper transforms this scene of decay and excess into an ornamental pattern whose disturbing origin only becomes apparent upon closer inspection.

Musandra with Collide Waves

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Tomo Shijak is one of the leading figures of the Macedonian avant-garde of the 1960s. His works combine painting and object art to create relief-like constructions made of wood, metal, and paint. The 1968 work Musandra with Collide Waves is part of a series. “Mousandra” refers to a traditional built-in cabinet, or a larger piece of built-in furniture, that was widespread throughout the Balkan region as far as Greece and was characterized by particularly rich woodwork. Today, a search for “Mousandra” on search engines primarily yields dance cafés and nightclubs. Shijak’s work, which is actually a bas-relief, also creates a mysterious space, combining different materials with a strict geometric arrangement of surfaces and elements. The title Musandra with Collide Waves also refers to sound waves. For a musical instrument—perhaps a gusle or a tambura from the Balkans—is also perceptible in the object. The “colliding waves” from the title also point to the phenomenon of interference—for when waves collide, they penetrate and superimpose one another undisturbed, and new patterns and rhythms can emerge. The work can thus be understood as an attempt to translate dynamic processes into a static form. At the same time, it reflects the 1960s’ interest in science, technology, and new models of perception.

No Level, March 2005

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Noli Me Tangere

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A pale green machine stands under a glass display case. It is a model. Actually, there are several of them. They are identical except for one that has an opening in its side. On display are workbenches that rest on three heavy legs on the floor. Horizontal metal guides can be seen at the front. Like the adjustable screws, also installed here, they are highly polished. On the left, there is a manual full of small operating lights and on the right, a crank that guides a pin. It is a professional lathe, which Dr. Gatev, dermatologist and artist, had reproduced as a model. This series of works refers to an artistic project from the communist era when Gatev took over a metalworking company for a day as its director. His order to the employees was to create all workpieces, such as screws, nuts and other tool parts, out of wood. For one day, unusable (but artistically valuable) copies were created.

Dr. Gatev, who is also addressed as an artist by his medical title, calls the series Noli me tangere. The title is an allusion to the New Testament encounter between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, where she tries to touch the Risen Lord, but he rejects her. As a dermatologist, Dr. Gatev is familiar with the sensitivity and vulnerability of skin. At the same time, these devices symbolize for him the interface of the incompatible and yet intimate: the point of contact “between psyche and technology, between the individual and the many, energy and the system, and – perhaps – between God and I.”

Pacing

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Pacing (1962), the title of Jeanne Spiteris’s work, refers to a dynamic movement. Fans of long-distance sports, such as running or cycling, are familiar with the importance of this technique. It helps athletes pace themselves in terms of energy and speed and prevents a “slump” in stamina. This is clearly evident in Spiteris’s sculpture.

The sculpture consists of an open iron structure in which rough, flat metal struts form a rhythmic, wild composition. The individual elements appear like torn-off fragments striving in a single direction. The sculpture must stand on the floor to allow the viewer to perceive the “pulling away” of the movement even more clearly.

PALMA (TAPISSERIE)

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Sarah Ortmeyer’s artistic practice is characterized by a precise yet poetic engagement with cultural symbols, power structures, and emotional projection surfaces. Working with sculpture, installation, wall works, publications, and serial formats, she explores how collective images drawn from history, politics, religion, play, or popular culture generate, transmit, and stabilize meaning.

At the center of her work are often everyday or seemingly familiar motifs that Ortmeyer formally reduces, shifts, or transforms. The wallpaper Palma, created for the evn collection, follows this approach. It belongs to the KOKO cycle, in which the artist examines images of paradise, escapism, and promises of wealth. Another key work from this cycle is the sculpture KOKO I, also part of the evn collection, originally produced for an exhibition at Belvedere 21. Wallpaper and sculpture are closely connected conceptually, expanding the visual and spatial field of KOKO across different dimensions.

Petrified (horse head)

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Near the northern English town of Knaresborough is a petrifying well: a spring that petrifies both organic and inorganic objects.

Every day, 3,200 liters of water containing lime and sodium sulfate in extremely high concentrations flow over a rock shaped like a giant head. In this tourist attraction, artist Christian Kosmas Mayer hung the head of a plush horse, which after a year under the falling water has assumed its current “fossilized” form.

For the 2013 intervention Musis et Mulis (Muses and Mules) in Prince Eugene’s ceremonial stables at the Belvedere Palace, Mayer installed the fossilized horse’s head and a video about the circumstances of its creation together with a dense presentation of medieval sacred paintings and petrified tree trunks for the museum’s exhibition The Master of Lichtenstein Castle and His Time. A little later, he reconstructed the format of a European dripping or petrifying well with stuffed animals and cave elements at the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna. The stuffed animals had previously been placed in the Jardin des Fontaines Pétrifiantes in La Sône, France; as the water evaporated it gradually covered the stuffed animals with a layer of stone. At the mumok, the fossils were clearly identifiable visually, yet museum visitors puzzled over the tales of Lot’s wife, the miner of Falun, and the existential archaeology of Pompeii. Objects became forms of memory, time capsules, like the more historically interesting Voyager Golden Record or the disposable items in Andy Warhol’s cardboard boxes.

Phenomenon

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Ahileas Apergis’s work “Phenomenon,” created in 1974, is an iron sculpture measuring 48 × 58 × 28 cm. The title itself suggests the preferred interpretation. Here, the phenomenon is not understood as something that can be fixed, but as a state that reveals itself without ever being fully captured in a concept or image.

Apergis’ sculpture stands within the context of a European material aesthetic that underwent numerous renewals in the 1970s, in which industrial materials, constructive processes, and a reduced formal language enter into new relationships. His work moves between a seemingly constructive arrangement and an openness of the material that allows its own traces, reactions, and resistances to become visible. Here, iron is not merely a carrier of form, but an active component in the creation of the image—a material that does not resist time, but is at its mercy.

The sculpture unfolds as a vertically structured construction of rods and thin-walled plate elements, whose surfaces range from gray and earthy tones to brass-like hues. Added to this is a rough material surface, in places marked as if by corrosion. These color and surface conditions subvert any heroic notion of patina and shift the focus to decay as a form-shaping moment, as work on the material itself. In doing so, Apergis consistently works on a model-like scale. The work remains small, not oriented toward monumentality or public installation. Precisely in this, it retains something provisional, open, and unfinished. Two tightly guided, curtain-like structures form the basic framework of a spatial drawing reminiscent of ephemeral phenomena such as the northern lights. These are not surfaces in the classical sense, but rather stratifications organized into gentle folds and undulating transitions—between compression and expansion, between proximity and distance—forming a graphic silhouette that resembles seismic recordings or mineral fractures.

Potentialities beyond political sadness

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Chto Delat sounds like a Russian icebreaker and it can do what they can: namely, sail frozen oceans. However, the collective is not made up of sailors, but artists, critics, writers and philosophers.

Their goal is to show how fragile life is today, how deadlocked the political, economic and ecological situation, how dangerous the rebirth of nationalism, imperialism and fundamentalism, and what role art plays in this scenario. In this respect, Chto Delat (Russian for “What to do?”) is a nom de guerre, a secret cipher that finds its starting point in the person of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin when he called for a revolutionary Marxist workers’ party in 1902. Founded in 2003 in St. Petersburg, Chto Delat wants to continue the great tradition of the Russian avant-garde and preserve their militant optimism. To this end, they have further developed and sharpened various formats, some of them classic: Bertold Brecht’s Singspiel, for example, participatory theater, propaganda tools such as the Learning Flags (in the evn collection, for example, Lenin. Fly Like a Butterfly, Sting like a Bee, 2011, Inv. No. 0384), murals, public actions, film, video, and spectacular exhibitions described as ’tragic,’ such as the Vienna Secession in 2014 and the Berlin gallery KOW (Time Capsule. Artistic Report on Catastrophies and Utopia).

Their numerous activities are coordinated by a core group that includes the following members: Tsaplya Olga Egorova (artist, Saint Petersburg), Artiom Magun (philosopher, Saint Petersburg), Nikolay Oleynikov (artist, Moscow), Natalia Pershina/Glucklya (artist, Saint Petersburg), Alexey Penzin (philosopher, Moscow), David Riff (art critic, Moscow), Alexander Skidan (poet, critic, Saint Petersburg), Oxana Timofeeva (philosopher, Moscow), and Dmitry Vilensky (artist, Saint Petersburg).

Psycho Hitchhiker

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Douglas Gordon’s themes are time, memory and the psychological mechanisms of people in relation to a changing social structure. One of his works is 24 Hour Psycho, a video version of Hitchcock´s classic, stretched out to 24 hours. The photo Psycho Hitchhiker shows the artist hitchhiking. The destination on his sign is “Psycho”. A multi-layered network of associations and references – hitchhiker and Hitchcock, road movies and the motive of the hitchhiker, the black and white photo and the B movies of the 60´s – make this simple photo into a complex distillation.

Red Moravec, June 2004

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Resistance

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Art is what’s on the pedestal - that’s another life lesson. This could be the artists themselves, like Gilbert and George as the Singing Sculpture dancing on a coffee table. Or everything turns around and the pedestal is the art, as in Constantin Brâncuși’s work, for whom the two amount to the same thing, blurring the boundaries between art and everyday life. The 350 clay figures by the Swiss artists Fischli/Weiss, on the other hand, can be subordinated in all sorts of ways to have Plötzlich diese Übersicht [suddenly this overview.]

Even for the queen of the plinth, Michèle Pagel, everything is open. Her adipose, cast concrete caryatids support signs and symbols of culture and civilization–moments of world history as well as allegories of light spirits and heavy bodies. They balance the meaningful and the trivial, regardless. This could be the cool Rolls-Royce bonnet mascot Spirit of Ecstasy or a raised, clenched fist, the motif of the sculpture Widerstand [en. resistance] from the evn collection. This gesture for solidarity, strength and protest protrudes from a brutalist concrete pillar and resolutely combines political symbolism with a wooden club like the one carried by the Log Lady in Twin Peaks.

Ribs

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In the postwar Soviet Union, people were banned from owning albums containing popular music, especially rock or jazz from the West. Those students caught with such contraband were subject to suspension, or even expulsion, from their school or university. For some people, jail time or imprisonment in a labor camp were real possibilities. To counteract this, some ingenious Russian sound engineers developed a way to subvert the ban: they copied albums onto x-ray films they were given by hospital staff eager to discard their “trash.” Playable on a normal record player and more easily smuggled, these x-ray-film records—nicknamed “ribs,” “music on bones,” and “bones”— became a hot commodity on the black market until the advent of the audio cassette tape. Ribs takes a sample of these Soviet recordings, this “jazz on ribs,” and returns them to their original function: to be displayed on a doctor’s x-ray viewer.

Riddles

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In 2017 Marguerite Humeau was invited for an outdoor project in the gardens of Versailles for which she created the project RIDDLES – Sphinx Otto Has Absorbed Humankind. Sphinx Otto is an over-dimensional sculpture made of white plastic. This figure is situated in a spot not far from the famous,17th century Triumphal Arch Grove by André le Nôtre. The artist is on the trail of multiple cosmological references and processes and combines them with a contemporary approach. For her project, she develops narratives and fantastic contexts. In the Versailles project, Humeau sees the Sphinx as a kind of earth protector with decision-making power between life and death. It asks people questions and poses riddles. Poisonous plants surrounding the Sphinx, among them Cornus Sanguinea, Cornus alba Sibirica, Salix Alba Chermesina, Hamamelis, and Sedum, in turn protect the Sphinx herself. For the wallpaper in the evn collection, Marguerite Humeau chose the fibers of the blood dogwood (Cornus Sanguinea). These plants become an impenetrable mesh in the pattern, which, in turn, also raise the question of one’s own point of view.

Serpent remembrance

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In her multidisciplinary work, Tabita Rezaire combines spirituality, digital technologies, and decolonial forms of knowledge. Her works explore connections between the body, cosmos, and memory, opening up spaces where healing and belonging can be reimagined. This approach also shapes the wallpaper shown here.

The work brings together motifs of planets, snakes, and the figure of Mother Moon into a pictorial space where cosmic order, female genealogies, and spiritual forces converge. The ornamental patterns in bold colors reflect Rezaire’s intensive engagement with the Saramaccans (Saamaka), an ethnic group in French Guiana. Since the 1980s, many members of this group have migrated from neighboring Suriname to the rainforests of Guiana due to political unrest. Today, they constitute a small yet culturally influential segment of the population. The Saramaccans are one of six Maroon communities that emerged from refugees of African descent and developed independent social and cultural structures beginning in the 17th and 18th centuries. A defining feature is their matrilineal organization: identity, property, and kinship are passed through the maternal line. Twelve large family groups, whose ancestry is traced back to African tribal mothers, form the basic social units. These clans shape community life more strongly than village structures. Religious practices and spiritual rituals play a central role.

Spa 2

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Maja Vukoje’s work addresses the connection between global flows of goods and cultural exchange. In concise visual language, the artist illustrates economic, financial, and communicative worldwide interconnectedness. In the large-format painting Spa 2 (2020, acrylic on jute, 170 × 140 cm), there are accessories from the world of bathing culture – for example, an oversized cosmetic mirror and dynamic toilet paper. The multiplication of this motif as wallpaper gives the impression of an oversized grid system. We marvel at how Maja Vukoje cleverly wraps the pink paper around the bars, but at the same time are reminded of the hysterical “consumer experience” at the beginning of the Corona pandemic in the spring of 2020.

Spaces about other Spaces

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A few images can be discerned on a wallpaper. They are reproductions of paintings by her grandfather, surrounded by a repeated lily motif on a blue background. In this setting, the paintings appear like quotations, highlighted by illusionistic frames and at the same time flattened, merged with the background—both present and distant.

Tolia Astakhishvili grew up in her grandfather’s studio, in a house in Tbilisi, Georgia. The roughly 250 m² house was a network of living and working spaces in which life and art blended seamlessly. The house was created with three artists and the wallpaper with golden lilies decorated one of the workrooms. In the 1930s, he was a well-known artist who, despite the isolation of the Soviet art scene and political restrictions, succeeded in developing an independent artistic voice. Astakhishvili’s revival of his work is therefore not only an act of private remembrance but also a contribution to the art history of modernism.

Suburban Motif

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Dušan Perčinakov is widely considered one of the most important Macedonian artists of the twentieth century. Although his works are highly recognizable, the artist has continued to fascinate audiences with his consistency, dedication, and perfectionism for nearly six decades. Two years after representing Macedonia in the Yugoslav Pavilion at the 1978 Venice Biennale, he became a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Skopje, becoming one of the most respected lecturers for several generations of students.

Tapete 2000

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Born in Zwickau in 1984, artist Henrike Naumann’s Installations and video works deal with the political and aesthetic history of reunified Germany. Her work revolves around the everyday culture of the GDR, the upheavals following 1990, and the question of how design —furniture, interiors, patterns—reflects social ideologies. Naumann understands design as a historical testimony: a material archive that makes power relations, hopes, and conflicts visible. The wallpaper ‘Tapete2000’ (from Tapete, German for ‘wallpaper’), created for evn collection, unites design objects from East and West from the 1990s and 2000s in a scatter pattern. Toasters, floor lamps, speakers, and small furniture pieces become ornaments that continue Naumann’s longstanding exploration of the aesthetic ruptures of the post-reunification era. The seemingly random distribution of objects points to a transitional period in which floor plans, lifestyles, and consumer cultures were being reorganized—and in which many people’s everyday lives oscillated between old habits and new promises.

A key aspect of this work is the choice of the background material: the motif of woodchip, or Ingrain wallpaper. Often dismissed as stuffy or old-fashioned today, it once was an expression of functional modernism. Invented in the 19th century and later valued during the Bauhaus era, it was considered a resource-efficient, durable, and easily repaintable alternative to patterned wallpaper. Its practicality—the ability to cover minor wall imperfections and the possibility of frequent repainting—once perceived as an advantage, now often lost its appeal. The fact that the company that invented it is based in Wuppertal and bears the surname Erfurt builds an unexpected bridge to Naumann’s engagement with German everyday cultures and their political connotations.

Ted Shed

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

TED-SHED revisits the spectacular case of the so-called Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, who used parcel bombs to maim and kill people in the USA in the 1980s and 90s. Kaczynski, originally a professor of mathematics, wrote anarchist manifestos calling for a completely new social order. The only way out of the dominant capitalist system that he could see was to destroy it. Hermit-like, he withdrew to a cabin in the woods from where, over many years, he carried out attacks using letter bombs, until he was arrested in 1998 and imprisoned for life.

A total of three motifs are repeated over the wallpaper: a facial composite of the wanted terrorist, Kaczynski’s typewriter, and a box with assorted parcel bomb paraphernalia. The background is a numeric table, a list of numbers that contains a hidden code.

THE DAY I KILLED ELVIS (Wallpaper)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In The Day I Killed Elvis, Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe presents hundreds of miniature self‑portraits. Adopting the stance of a cowboy and referencing Andy Warhol’s Double Elvis, she points a revolver directly at the viewer. Through the circular multiplication of the figure in an irregular sequence, the image evokes associations with kaleidoscopes, bobbin lace, rotating cogwheels, or Gothic architectural elements. In its configuration as a wallpaper, the motif relinquishes heroic singularity and instead acquires a rhythmic, almost ornamental quality.

The iconic cowboy—an emblem of Western masculinity, violence, and myth—is displaced through Tambwe’s act of self‑appropriation and critically reframed from a feminist perspective. Repetition and seriality function not merely as decorative devices but as central mechanisms of meaning production. The wallpaper becomes a pictorial surface that mediates between individual identity and collective visual memory, while simultaneously structuring the surrounding space. The logic of repetition follows a fractal structure: the image multiplies and occupies the visual space, while the repeated body remains present and disrupts the perception of the decorative surface. The seemingly floral structure this way becomes an expression for a critical interrogation of representation, visibility, and power. The fractal functions herein less as a formal principle than as a strategic tool.

The landscape that I want to see

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Vangel Naumovski was born in 1922 in Ohrid, Macedonia. First he started to show interest in arts in the elementary school and those interests led him to the newly founded art high school in Skopje right after the end of World War 2. After many disputes between him and his professors in the art school in 1947 he got kicked out of it with “untalented” written over his dossier. He learned the basics of painting and drawing in a woodcarving studio in his hometown of Ohrid and there he had his firs individual exhibition in 1954. His whole life his art was treated as “naive” but he always tended to bring this expression very close to the surrealism and abstract painting. His original rounded forms, reduction of details and expressive colors are trying to show the pure and clear idea of love and beauty uniting the figurative and abstract, the reality and fantasy. We can connect him and recognize some influence from other foreign artists such as Jean Arp and Joan Miro. PhD Vladimir Velichkovski (Professor on Modern art on the Philosophy faculty in Skopje) once said “He took the light out of the paradise and in his own unique way he managed to unite the water, the sky and the earth”.

In 1967 he got accepted by the Macedonian fine artists association as a member and that actually showed that Macedonian art community recognized the mistake that was made 20 years earlier by treating him as untalented and not letting him to visit the classes in the only real art school in the country.
Naumovski is one of the few Macedonian artists that actually succeeded in presenting his work to the art-world outside of our borders and he got a lot of attention and recognitions. He had 30 individual exhibitions, participated in more than 100 group exhibitions, he received many awards and his work is now treated as a significant part in the development of the Macedonian modern art.

The Maelström-Project

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The sculpture Maelström has no fixed form. As with a fun-fair attraction, it only comes to life when one pushes the button and sets it going. Attila Csörgö is a tinkerer with a propensity for physical paradoxes and optical illusions; one who searches for astonishing – and astonishingly simple – demonstrations and illusion pictures. In the Maelström Project, motor oil is set rotating by means of a motor which simultaneously serves as the base for an aluminium vessel holding the oil. The heavy, black, shiny liquid forms a reflective surface that bends more and more inwards, like a parabolic mirror. From the moment the motor is switched on and until it reaches its maximum speed, the curve changes continuously, the hollow space gaining in depth. Due to the continuous change of proportion, the reflection of the room undergoes drastic alteration.

The title of the interactive and variable sculpture is derived from a horror story by Edgar Allen Poe. In “A Descent into the Maelström”, there is a description of a gigantic whirlpool that sucks everything down into its depths. Poe imagined a “smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round”. Attila Csörgö constructed a series of experiments showing with what simple physical means a state can be created which leads into a zone of fantastic transformation. If one gazes into the continuouslyaccelerating, rotating mirror of oil, then one can be caught up in a state of sensual destabilisation – if only for a few moments.

Untitled

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Nora Turato’s artistic material is language. Thus, her work encompasses the infinite terrain of words, be they rhymed and unrhymed, logical and illogical, clever and banal, be they assertions, slogans, or mere text fragments, a scrap from the news, or debris from social media. The artist is actually a performer, and in this genre she created a furor at the 2015 Venice Biennial. She crosses the border between art and life on a whim, and is interested in such rich and diverse topics as reading and swimming, Netflix, the Canadian sportswear line Lululemon, the human voice, the political situation in the Arctic, dogs, advertisements, cinema … In dramatic monologues, deeply embedded in the present day, she turns her obsessions to the audience. Her instruments are the smartphone and the laptop, and with them, she creates posters, large-format works in enamel, and murals made of text components from her performance scripts. The aesthetic of the works refers to design and usage patterns of graphic design, which Nora Turato combines with her own handwriting.

For the evn collection, the artist developed a wallpaper whose content refers to the now integral and indispensable hand movement of scrolling in daily life, (I’ll just take my finger and scroll), and the importance of energy for machines and people (battery life and cameras). The initially enigmatic handwritten component of the wallpaper (suck on it, keeps saliva flowing) refers to the 1997 Canadian science fiction horror film Cube, in which six people, unknown to each other, meet in a maze of industrial cube-shaped rooms and try to escape from the Kafkaesque set. They suck on the buttons of their clothes to keep the flow of saliva going and thus suppress the feeling of hunger.

Untitled

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This small object is an add-on to the wallpaper Alex Pompeii by Katinka Bock. Commissioned in 2021 by the evn collection, it features an abstract motif of fleeting contours and lines. In fact, the wallpaper is based on a black-and-white photograph of a T-shirt taken in Pompeii in the summer of 2021. When optically enlarged, however, the non-representational folded elements evoke marble paintings, trompe-l’œil depictions of “real” marble—thus establishing a connection to the ancient city, so deeply imbued by history

The object continues the wallpaper’s motif of imprint. Katinka Bock pours bronze into the shell of a lemon from Capri—the mold burns away, leaving the fruit’s body as a unique imprint full of traces of the organic. When viewed, the form becomes an artifact outside of any temporality: Traces of embers evoke the Italian summer heat, but also the many thousands of artifacts and human lives buried under ash in Pompeii in 79 AD.

Untitled

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Rudolf Stingel’s annual gift was created in connection with his solo exhibition at the Vienna Secession in 2012. Produced exclusively for supporters and patrons, this small-format work is neither available for general sale nor intended as a mere reproduction. Rather, it is an independent artistic work that stands in close dialogue with the artist’s oeuvre while simultaneously fostering a special bond between the artist, the institution, and the circle of supporters.

Rudolf Stingel’s work is situated at the intersection of conceptual art, painting, and sculpture. Since the late 1980s, he has continuously questioned the traditional categories of painting. A central point of reference in his work is the history of ornamentation. Following its programmatic rejection by classical modernism, ornament was long regarded as a sign of the outdated and the decorative. Stingel consciously revisits this historically burdened form. His ornaments are neither narrative nor functional; they appear as abstracted structures within a multi-layered art-historical system of meaning.

Untitled

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The work Untitled by Tanas Lulovski (1984) plays with the boundaries between illusion and materiality. The image depicts a seemingly raw, unprimed canvas that has come loose from its mounting on the wooden frame and is sliding down in heavy folds, revealing a white background. Yet this material decay is pure illusion; it thus alludes to art history—more specifically, to the ancient Pliny myth of the contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasios. While Zeuxis painted grapes that attracted birds, Parrhasios triumphed with a painted curtain that tempted Zeuxis to try to push it aside.

Untitled

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Following Kebab and Lollipop, both works from 2017, the two wall-mounted pieces Untitled caught the eye in 2024. They were on view in Sasha Auerbach’s first solo exhibition, Space Almond Head Void, at GOMO, an independent art space on Volkertplatz in Vienna’s Leopoldstadt district. In places like these—neither commercial galleries nor art dealers nor institutional spaces—spontaneity, a love of improvisation, and the tremendous dedication of everyone involved reign supreme. Art lovers adore them. There, one can find magnificent works by artists who, after graduating from college, find themselves in limbo, suspended in a state of uncertainty and waiting. This sense of emptiness and absence was already hinted at by the show’s title: the space, the head, the void…

The two objects made of lacquered steel initially resemble the frames of tavern signs, as crafted by rural metalworkers. Auerbakh, however, frames not content, but pure air. Instead, her narrative is positively overflowing with philosophy, psychoanalysis, quantum physics, and Buddhism. The artist is most deeply influenced by the “internal objects” of the Austrian-British analyst Melanie Klein (1882–1960). As early as in early childhood, wrote Anna Freud’s rival, relationships form with people who provide security and love, but who can also evoke rejection. These remain unconscious throughout our lives and influence our perceptions and expectations of other people.

Untitled (Ball)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Balls are round and filled with air. They can be solid-colored and of varying size. Psychologically they are always recognizable as balls; they are one of the classic toys. Marzena Nowakʼs sculptures fulfill these expectations. The “ball” is divided into blue and white segments, seems airy and looks like summer. Perhaps it has gotten a bit too large, but it is the over-dimensional quality that is alluring. It awakes memories: a smaller example, but with a similar impression of color, is what Peter Weibel used in 1966/7 in Expanded Cinema. It is marked by 1970s commercial television – one associates the glimpse of such a ball with sun, free-time, vacation. Marzena Nowak, too, concerns herself with memories in her work. Born in 1977 in Poland, the artist belongs to a generation that still personally experienced the heritage of communism – even when at a distance. “The visualization of emotions and those of that time go hand-in-hand with certain works,” Rainer Fuchs wrote in 2011 about the artistʼs abstract-geometric paintings. The sculpture in the evn collection was created in the same year and is similarly ascertainable. The processing and transformation of lived experience, embodied in certain objects and gestures, is a central theme. A certain ambivalence regarding materiality also plays a role. The seemingly-naturalistic ball is only superficially the copy of a ball. The sculpture is made of steel and the color has been applied in broad brushstrokes. The jumprope, hula hoop, tennis balls and other objects associated with memories, play with contradictory sensory-perception through their material conversion. The conversion transforms a light object into a monumental body that defines its environs. The sculpture has a strong physical presence. The charming plaything becomes a central object in the space as if Marzena Nowak wanted to convey to us that the past can still be experienced and its presence will not be repressed.

Untitled (figure 01)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Brilant Milazimi casts creatures with endless legs and arms for his paintings. They have heads as round as bowling balls, are as transparent as X-ray images and live in an unreal universe bubble with floating garlands of baby teeth. Are they children, teenagers or adults? Their appearance: ageless. It’s creepy. If you are looking for role models, E.T., the alien who wants to phone home, seems an obvious choice. Alien - exactly! But the creatures also have human traits: grinning, they intertwine their bodies to dance and socialize in groups. The picture titles reveal their desires, thoughts and aspirations: Let’s See is one, another Should I Tell You Something, or Everything Starts at Home.

Untitled (figure 01), shows a young man in a bright white cell. Milazimi likes to use a strong magenta for his figures, as is the case here. The young man is sitting on a wooden chair, stark naked and smoking. A mirror leans against the wall. He is joined by an enigmatic animal with pointed ears, a pointed beak and two thin legs. Neither a dog nor a rat. What are we looking at here? A situation from the life of the artist in Pristina? A glimpse into Kosovo’s past? Clues to its present?

Untitled (HERE/YOU) OUT OF THE INDEX (R.S.)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

There was a time when the artist Nicolas Jasmin acted under the pseudonym N.I.C.J.O.B., a flashy logo like those common among DJs. The works created between 1996 and 2006 actually had a lot to do with the cut-up technique of sampling. They were film and video works for which Jasmin used found footage as material, manipulating it and mixing it into new sequences of images.

Today, Nicolas Jasmin describes that decade as a ‘detour’, starting from and moving towards painting. As early as 1989, while studying with Arnulf Rainer at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, he imposed a set of rules on himself, the Painting Dogma. It prescribed burlap as a painting ground, for example, and forbade format-filling painting.

Untitled (ILLUSIONS) OUT OF THE INDEX (R.S.)

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Untitled (MIRROR) OUT OF THE INDEX (R.S.)

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Untitled (NO/CACTUS) OUT OF THE INDEX (R.S.)

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Untitled (Tropez)

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The EVN headquarters in Maria Enzersdorf is a building from the early 1960s and one of the few office buildings in Austria to have retained the original language of post-war modernist architecture. The grid structure of the windows and the regular facade structure are clearly visible from the outside. Inside the building, the design language is also reduced and functional, albeit implemented with simple elegance.

The wallpaper that Paulina Semkowicz (born 1980 in Krakow, lives in Vienna) created for the evn sammlung 2024 also uses a grid-like structure as its basic motif. The grid extends across all seven floors of the stairwell. Unlike the grid resulting from the function of the building’s curtain wall glass facade, Paulina Semkowicz’s grid is a distorted image of a regular structure. She distorts and twists the grid, which is regular in itself, and thus brings movement and liveliness to this form of order. It is a very playful approach to form and material, almost a caricature of the existing logical structure. The motif was created very classically with ink and color pigments on cardboard, photographed and digitally implemented as wallpaper. Despite this technical necessity, the highly painterly effect can be seen, as the grid is underlaid with an incredible variation of color tones. Each floor has its own world of color and dynamics. It is obvious that the artist studied stage painting and is therefore particularly good at dealing with dimensions and spatial effects. Paulina Semkowicz manages to create transparency, light and depth through her painting. And thus also provides the perfect stage for illusion and imagination.

Untitled (wallpaper)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The wallpaper by Denisa Lehocká, one of the most important Slovak artists of her generation, is based on a square drawing. The toned paper is covered with a large number of carefully placed numbers in red ink. Even though numerals, which once came from India and Arabia and revolutionized the European Middle Ages through their practicality, are commonly associated with order and systems, there is nothing of that here. If one thinks of the art history of the 20th century and artists such as Roman Opałka or Hanne Darboven, the handling of written or drawn numerals is conceptually occupied. Denisa Lehocká, like Darboven and Opałka, is very interested in the process of numbering as an activity, but her way of working is striving more towards the result than processing concepts.Thus in this drawing and in its duplication and enlargement as a wall-sized wallpaper we see the result of a very delicate yet spontaneous compilation. Numbers group and organically coalesce without revealing themselves as anything in particular. Enigmatic cloud formations are perhaps reminiscent of a scientific chart, of a surveying of nature. Seen up close, these formations become something very personal. This has to do with the artist’s signature, which conveys authenticity, but also with Denisa Lehocká’s ability to create a balance of intimacy and fragility in her works.

Vestibule

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The sculpture Vestibule by Manuel Gorkiewicz was created specifically for its first public presentation at the Prellenkirchen wind park. The title refers to an architectural antechamber—commonly known as a “windbreak” or vestibule—and reflects the work’s engagement with spatial transition and environmental interaction. Wind, as a defining element of the site, sets the sculpture gently in motion, emphasizing its kinetic qualities.

Gorkiewicz’s artistic practice explores forms and motifs drawn from everyday life and historical architecture. Vestibule incorporates references to medieval English festival structures, whose characteristic silhouettes have endured over centuries. The central vertical element recalls these historical forms, while the colorful canopy evokes the playful aesthetics of wind wheels often seen at celebratory events.

Vestibule (sketch)

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Vivarium St. Marx, Vienna tiles

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American artist Mark Dion investigates nature and its representation as a cultural construct. The Vivarium St. Marx is a hybrid work combining sculpture and architecture that bridges biology and landscape design, art and the natural sciences. In the foyer of the Biology Center at the University of Vienna, a tree trunk removed from the building’s foundation rests within the self-contained greenhouse ecosystem. At once both dead and alive, its decomposition creates a new habitat for fungi, lichens, bacteria, and small insects. Images of the imagined inhabitants adorn the white tiles of the base area. The result is a living sculpture that changes daily, representing nature as a complex system of cycles and processes through the ongoing process of decay and renewal.

At the same time, Mark Dion’s Vivarium St. Marx recalls the history of one of the world’s most significant biological research institutions. Built in the Prater as a publicly accessible exhibition aquarium for the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair, the Vivarium became a world-leading research institute for experimental biology by 1900. Following Austria’s annexation by Nazi Germany in 1938, the institute’s directors and founders were removed from office, persecuted, and in several cases murdered. In 1945, the Neo-Renaissance building burned down and was subsequently demolished.

W6

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Silvie Fleury became known at the end of the nineties with works which transferred feminine luxury goods into ready-mades in an art context. She staged herself as a “fashion victim” and enthusiastic consumer within the capitalist system. Nevertheless, her lipstick rockets, her cuddly, artificial fur objects or chrome-plated bronze sculptures of transmuted cult objects can be understood as ironic infiltrations of this economic model.

In 1999, she appropriated the last male bastion in sport, Formula 1 racing, in an examination of the relationship between sexes. She took the racing costume of world champion Mika Häkkinen as the model for her design of the Formula One Dress, and had herself captured for posterity in a chic photo together with the sport idol. The sculpture W6 belongs in this area of metaphorical transmutations of maids, men and motors. The Formula 1 tyre – a chrome-plated bronze cast – was made at the same time as castings of motors for a prior generation of sports cars. It looks almost dreamily old-fashioned, but nevertheless evokes the knowledge that the last circuit in the race for equality has still not been run.

Walden

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Wallpaper

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

So, it’s wallpaper now, is it? After Neo-Geo painting and foil pictures, after plexiglass plates, PVC objects, here a scaffolding, there a wall, a bench, a cord and other barriers, after the total dramaturgical freedom of DJing for club cultures, after abstraction, geometry, computer animation, strict perception exercises, grid systems, after constructive-concrete art, signs and pictograms, Gerwald Rockenschaub subjected himself, in his recent exhibition in the Linz Palace Museum, to an examination or, in the show’s title, a reappropriation (allure/construct). The presentation had been precisely developed for the exhibition galleries, optimally tailored to this venue alone. Like all appearances of Rockenschaub’s compositions, it was masterful and nonchalant.

When he agreed to contribute a design for the sixth edition of the evn collection’s staircase series Wallpapers, we were all the more enthused and motivated, as well as challenged, to find a way of placing his work in relationship with another work from our collection.

Water Lilies

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The title of Bar du Bois’ (engl. wood bar) wallpaper, Water Lilies, evokes the beginnings of modernism and the first decades of the 20th century. Leaving Impressionism behind, Claude Monet (1840–1926) moved away from landscape painting via the motif of water lilies anchored in water and found an early form of abstraction by abandoning the horizon. Viewed from above and without clear reference points, a horizontal surface became an indeterminate space in the vertical.

Like their famous artist colleague from Giverny, the Viennese art collective Bar du Bois, founded in 2013, also uses this effect and the oscillation of a liquid surface as an iridescent and diffuse basis. Their ‘blossoms’ come from the world of contemporary goods: rolls of adhesive tape, hotel suitcase trolleys, pacifiers, tobacco products of various kinds, pill boxes, a Diddl Mouse drawing from the 1990s, and other artifacts of everyday culture cavort on the dark green shimmering background. For the wallpaper commissioned by the evn collection, various motifs were treated in a painterly manner and digitally placed in the ‘pond’, a nature morte of modern bohemians. In a clever, repetitive wallpaper pattern, a theoretically infinite water surface and the objects floating on it emerge like a visual mantra.

When was the last time you felt truly alive, my love?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Klelija Zhivkovikj’s practice straddles the realms of art, design, and research, exploring social, emotional, and ecological networks of relationships. As the artist herself puts it, the starting point is always “the ongoing research into aliveness that drives my artistic practice.” Building on Audre Lorde’s understanding of the erotic as a force and Anna Tsings’ concept of restoring species-rich life in the Holocene, Zhivkovikj is dedicated to exploring aliveness as a fundamental resource shared by all living beings. In light of the complex technological, political, and ecological challenges of the present, she sees her work as a contribution to the task of imagining and actively bringing forth a world that is regaining its strength.

The wallpaper she designed for the evn collection, with its poetic title, is based on a serial, geometric pattern. The dark background intensifies the effect of the graphic elements and creates a dense, concentrated atmosphere. To generate this pattern, the artist—who trained with a focus on social design—used digital software: with the help of TouchDesigner, a visual programming language for the real-time creation of multimedia content, she visualized sound and voice recordings from earlier works in real time using a pre-written code. The image data generated in this way forms the basis of the wallpaper pattern and translates immaterial, time-based content into a permanent visual structure. In doing so, Zhivkovikj follows an expanded concept of technology: “Technology is not just the capitalist manifestation of ingenuity […]. It is any tool that we can access that can transform one thing into another.” Formally, the work recalls patterns from the Wiener Werkstätte, particularly its strictly geometric ornamentation with clear contrasts on a dark background. However, this reference is not used in a historicizing manner, but rather transposed into a contemporary conText: for Zhivkovikj, ornament is a medium of relationship and resonance—driven by the conviction that technologies, beyond their capitalist use, possess the potential to have a transformative impact on the shaping of the present.

Winner

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Naso Bekarovski’s sculpture “Winner” has a distinct front side. A circular disc with a plate-like rim rises from a pedestal; its center is defined by a depression from which a circular bulge protrudes. The enigmatic form is reminiscent of a shield, a target, or a sculptural emblem. Although the title refers to a winner, the work appears less as a trophy than as an archaic totem or a mysterious artifact from a murky past. It could be a monument, a landmark, or a darkened memorial, as well as a warlike artifact, a shield for defense, or a target to be struck.

Würfelspiel

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

It is the verve of opposition and critique that give VALIE EXPORT, a pioneer of feminist art, her remarkable youthful élan. A fighting attitude and belief in the possibility of change also characterize her art, which is informed by an analysis of society, politics, and civilization.

The cubic die is a recurrent motif in her work. It meets us as architecture, taking, for example, the form of a pavilion like in her Cube EXPORT – The Transparent Space (1999) underneath an arched subway viaduct on Lerchenfelder Gürtel in Vienna. It meets us in photo montages as in Woman with Dice (1989), a picture from a series of works in the tradition of Dadaist collages, in which EXPORT fuses elements from the object world, the animal kingdom, or architecture into the (female) body. We also see it in her video Anagrammatic Composition with Game of Dice (2010). Following an Instruction for the composing of waltzes by means of two dice … ascribed to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, EXPORT uses this oldest randomized composition technique to dice out a piece of music, and then renders the melody filmically, as a video, and sculpturally, as a glass screen. In a developer’s ambitious building project, she again uses the shape for an artistic intervention, strewing cubic dice out across hardwood floors or incising them in PVC floor coverings.

What the artist is most interested in, aside from the haptic and material qualities of the dice and the gesture of throwing dice in a game, are the various mathematical principles that govern the act of dicing, its significance for modern information and computer technology, chance and risk. The image of cosmic cubic formations in outer space, acoustically accompanied by the rumblings of massive icebergs, keeps recurring to her constantly searching mind.

ZEIT (Objekte aus der Serie A)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Z is at the beginning and to the left side. Its black, upper horizontal bar is elongated downward through a sharp angle. Someone might see a number 7 – but it has a rather unusual continuation. The lower bar points in a straight line to the right, in strict parallel to its upper brother, but considerably longer than the design of the letter. It appears as if, arriving at the bottom, the Z is accelerating. At the same time, at the end of its path, one can make out the neck of an overturned, second letter, a T fallen 90 degrees. Without difficulty, we can read in the abbreviation the word “Zeit” (time). The ability to easily decode abbreviations is one of the idiosyncrasies of human reading ability. Vowels that are left out are easier to replace. Both of the consonants contour the outer corners like a picture, lending structure as well as a lapsed span of time. Josef Bauer uses this effect. He is an artist who broaches self-referencing in language in his oeuvre. The term “script-picture” describes the bi-polarity with which the objects can be encountered. They activate a puzzle-effect, a decision whether a word or a wall-sculpture is visible in the formation. It is impossible to see both at the same time, the wall-object as picture and as word, though the latter is stretched (through the length of its starting letter) and shortened (through the absence of vowels) at the same time.