PREVIOUSLY ON ...
SOLOSHOW
KUNSTWOHNUNG WIEN - KRUMMBAUMGASSE 1, 1020 WIEN
2026
OPENING: DI 8. SEPT. 18.00
Previously on… brings together works from the past three years and takes its title from a phrase deeply embedded in the grammar of American television series. “Previously on…” marks the moment of return before a story continues: a condensed recollection of what has already happened, a threshold between past and present, memory and anticipation.
For the artist, however, the phrase has a second, more personal significance. American television series are a constant presence in the studio. While painting, episodes run in the background, often without being consciously followed. They form a kind of continuous acoustic environment—something between background noise and subconscious image archive. The title Previously on… therefore refers not only to the works that preceded the exhibition, but to a specific condition of their making: painting as a state in which conscious intention and unconscious absorption continuously overlap.
This tension between the conscious and the subconscious is central to Threshold. The title refers to the threshold as a spatial and psychological condition, but also recalls one of the fundamental functions of the icon in Eastern Christian art. The icon is traditionally not understood merely as an image representing a sacred subject. It constitutes a threshold: a point of encounter between the visible and the invisible, between the material world and a reality that exceeds representation. The icon does not simply depict another world; it establishes a relation to it.
The paintings of Threshold emerge from this historical understanding while deliberately moving beyond the religious image in its conventional form. Their reduced geometries and luminous colours recall aspects of the icon: its concentration, its refusal of illusionistic space and its capacity to turn the act of looking into an experience of presence. The paintings do not illustrate a religious narrative. Instead, they retain something of the icon’s original ambition—the possibility that an image might become a site of encounter rather than an object of representation.
In this sense, the threshold is not a border that separates two clearly defined territories. It is a condition of suspension.
This openness is continued in A Measure of Presence, a series of sculptures made from wax and clay. Here, the question of presence moves from the painted surface into physical space. The sculptures take their dimensions and configurations from the space enclosed by folded hands. The gesture may evoke prayer, meditation, contemplation or protection, yet the works remain deliberately detached from a specific religious doctrine. What matters is the physical structure of the gesture: the creation of an interior space through the meeting of two hands.
The empty space between the hands becomes a measure of something that cannot itself be grasped. It is simultaneously intimate and universal, bodily and immaterial. In this respect, A Measure of Presence continues the spiritual proposition already implicit in *Threshold*: that the invisible need not be represented in order to become perceptible. It can instead be approached through concentration, absence, silence and bodily experience.
The two groups therefore describe different but interconnected forms of threshold. Threshold approaches the space between the visible and the invisible through painting; A Measure of Presence approaches it through the body and sculpture. Both are concerned with creating situations in which perception can slow down and become receptive.
C 2026