Vienna’s contemporary art scene thrives on a productive tension between history and reinvention. Long associated with conceptual tradition, the city’s artistic landscape continues to evolve through transnational exchange and material experimentation. The eight artists featured here – Erwin Bohatsch, Tatjana Danneberg, Jojo Gronostay, Irina Lotarevich, Lazar Lyutakov, Alex Macedo, Ursula Mayer, and Antoinette Zwirchmayr – reflect the breadth of the practices shaping the results. 

These profiles were developed through the Art Writing Programme of Phileas – The Austrian Office for Contemporary Art, an initiative dedicated to supporting critical discourse and fostering a new generation of writers. Selected through an open call, eight participants worked closely with the writer and editor Amy Sherlock to produce focused pieces informed by studio visits and sustained editorial exchange. Together, they portray a city where established figures and emerging voices coexist. 

The project’s publication coincides with Kunsthalle Wien’s new exhibition, ‘Lebt und arbeitet in Wien: Contemporary Art from Vienna’, a major survey bringing together more than 50 Vienna-based artists and foregrounding the vitality of the Austrian capital’s art scene.

Erwin Bohatsch (b. 1951, Mürzzuschlag, Austria)
By Dóra Filo
Galerie Martin Janda

Since the 1970s, the Austrian painter Erwin Bohatsch has embraced abstraction as ‘the most adequate visual language’ to explore the possibilities of painting as an autonomous form. Graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 1976, Bohatsch came to be associated with the neo-expressionist Neue Wilden (the new Fauves), a group that positioned itself as a countermovement to conceptual and performance art. From early on in his career – in works such as Masken (1980) and Feuerschlucker (1983) – his use of intense, contrasting color and thick contours to dominate the surface can be seen, with figurative elements and narratives gradually disappearing.

While other members of the group would go on to seek new forms of expression, Bohatsch stayed true to abstraction and sought new paths within it, from heavy, static black color blocks to light color transitions and monochrome works. He also experimented with exaggerated flower and drop-like forms, removing them from their natural contexts and occasionally combining them with rigid grid structures.

Throughout his practice, Bohatsch has avoided horizontal formats, which he feels suggest landscapes, and has increasingly eschewed giving his works titles or precise dates. His paintings remain unframed and are often large scale, with a powerful presence that demands attention, although the viewer is deliberately left unguided, struggling to locate and interpret the image. And with a career now spanning five decades, he regularly revises his earlier works, painting over those he decides no longer stand up to his own critical examination. As he puts it: ‘I don’t want to make too many pictures.’

Bohatsch’s practice is a response to present circumstances. By resisting fixed meaning, narrative clarity, and external reference, his work insists on painting as a space of autonomy, one that cannot be easily instrumentalized. Just as earlier moments of crisis gave rise to renewed commitments to non-representational art, Bohatsch’s sustained exploration suggests that, in times of instability and uncertainty, abstraction remains a means of confronting the present, offering a heightened awareness of perception, tension, and possibility.

Tatjana Danneberg (b. 1991, Vienna, Austria)
By Lukas Melo Frank
Isabella Ritter and Consonni Radziszewski

On the surface of it, Tatjana Danneberg’s photographs-turned-paintings have a beautiful simplicity that belies the artist’s concern with the way images both manipulate and are manipulated. Her large-format paintings feel like intimate excavation sites that reveal fragments of images while other parts remain deliberately buried. 

Using a point-and-shoot camera, Danneberg captures casual and intimate scenes: a hand up in the air at a New Year’s rave, dishes left in a sink, a face reflected in a chrome surface. These shots are enlarged and printed onto plastic foil before being painted over, binding image and paint together. Like a temporary tattoo applied to skin, only what her wet brush touches is transferred from foil to canvas, revealing the final image through gestural strokes, covered in cracks from the drying process. Certain visual information appears while other chunks are lost; the transfer is never complete.

Shadowing the history of photography itself, and before that, of print, Danneberg focuses on power hierarchies in processes of image-making and circulation. News media and its central role in producing shared realities ‘is politically charged, especially now, with the current US administration,’ she says. Her most recent works focus on US newspapers from the 1970s — not the headlines, but the puzzle pages, her oil-pastel marks wrestling with the grids of collaged comic strips and crosswords. Peripheral to flagship articles, cartoons provide a subtle way to codify contemporary social matters and bury information in abstraction and playfulness. The strips are drawn on, scanned, and enlarged to canvas size before being transferred and painted on, with Danneberg imitating their codification and steps of abstraction away from the represented, whose relationship to the image lies at the core of her practice and sits at the forefront in social media’s algorithmic image-world. As with her photographic works, the question is: What has the right to be seen and what should be hidden away?

Visibility, Danneberg insists, is never neutral, it is always a question of control, whether via a camera, a newsroom, a social media feed, or the tools of a painter, where the brush becomes just another data stream. As non-human actors come to play an increasingly important role in the world of image creation, the stakes of this control have never been greater.

Jojo Gronostay (b. 1987, Hamburg, Germany)
By Valentina Schatzer
Galerie Hubert Winter

The art world brings certain objects, images, and gestures into focus, while others remain peripheral. Jojo Gronostay works within these same fields of attention, tracing what the circuits of global art, fashion, and postcolonial trade misplace, disown, or hope will quietly disappear.

Born in Germany with Ghanaian roots, Gronostay makes work using items found at various locations around the globe – at Accra’s Kantamanto Market, one of the world’s largest secondhand clothing hubs; in Paris’s Château Rouge neighborhood, where discarded cardboard-box ‘display stands’ become inadvertent monuments; and along the counterfeit-good-covered sidewalks of Barcelona. His practice is a form of outlaw collecting, assembling evidence that exposes how global value is really produced, displaced, and selectively restored. 

This logic is clearest in Dead White Men’s Clothes (DWMC), his ongoing hybrid of artwork, brand, and platform – uniquely recognized by both fashion prizes and major art institutions. In Kantamanto, imported secondhand garments are known as obroni wawu – or dead white men’s clothes, a phrase coined in the 1970s amid the shock of abundance when high-quality garments began arriving from the West in overwhelming quantities. The term describes a glitch in the value system. Since 2017, Gronostay has been sourcing garments from Kantamanto, screen-printing them with the DWMC label, and then rerouting them back into Western circulation – often returning them to the contexts that originally defined their desirability. By collapsing resale, critique, and branding into a single feedback loop, DWMC reveals how postcolonial trade continues to position the Global South as a site for managing surplus, waste, and moral absolution.

Across photography, installation, sculpture, and fashion, Gronostay treats debris as data. For his series ‘Landscapes’ (2024–25), he hand-scanned decomposing garments embedded in Ghana’s soil, turning waste into accidental paintings, a geological archive of global fashion. ‘Brutalism’ (2021) monumentalizes trashed shoe heels as architectural relics, while his most recent series, ‘Afterimage’ (2026), turns remnants of his own production – broken screen prints, shipping tape, half-erased lettering – into chromatic fields on Dibond, using colors from fashion forecasts as painterly material.

While art fairs fix value through attribution, scarcity, and price, Gronostay’s work focuses on where those mechanisms break down, making visible the power relations they usually conceal.

Irina Lotarevich (b. 1991, Rybinsk, Russia)
By Laura Schreiner
Sophie Tappeiner

Dangling hooks, stacks of metal boxes, an alphabet of twisted rebar. Irina Lotarevich’s sculptures and wall pieces inherit the seriality, repetition, and modularity of Minimal art but redirect these strategies into a different, emotionally charged register. Construction components and cool, hard surfaces do not function as neutral industrial materials, but are emotionally coded, suggestive of anxiety or intimidation, though combined with a sense of sensual allure. Where Donald Judd’s ‘specific objects’ sought autonomy from social reference, Lotarevich’s work makes entanglement its condition.

Born in Rybinsk, a historic trading city on Russia’s Volga River, Lotarevich moved with her parents to New York as a child. She later studied at Cornell University, Hunter College, in New York, and the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, where she now lives and works. Her geographic trajectory – from post-Soviet industrial collapse through neoliberal financialization to European art-market integration – provides the material coordinates that her practice systematically charts.

The work Volatility features six steel panels divided into grids like stock market heat maps. A fringe of rods hangs below, its peaks and troughs echoing fluctuation in share price: panic rendered as pattern. The anxiety-inducing impact of such rises and falls is concealed by the work’s rhythmic composition but perhaps implied by the menacingly contorted steel bars that fill some of the panels. An earlier work, Housing Anxiety 6 (2022) – a wall-mounted grid of aluminum locks and keys – injects floor-plan logic into housing precariousness, transforming the right to shelter into a locked grid where access and restriction become physically irreconcilable. In a similar register of structural tension, Galvanic Couple (2019) translates the dynamics of protection and vulnerability into material and relational terms. The floor sculpture – two interconnected steel constructions reminiscent of boats – references the process of galvanic coupling, whereby two connected pieces of metal are immersed in an electrolyte (damp air, water) and one of them preferentially corrodes, thereby protecting the other. It’s a sly allusion to both interpersonal and social dynamics.

Unlike Judd’s creations, Lotarevich’s sculptures are specific not through autonomy but through their concrete registration of access, value, and embodied longing. Using Minimalist techniques of repetition and modularity, she situates viewers within patterns that bodies must navigate, resist, or seek to breach.

Lazar Lyutakov (b. 1977, Shabla, Bulgaria)
By Jess Łukawska
Charim Galerie

The Bulgarian artist Lazar Lyutakov creates installations in which appropriated everyday items take center stage. Drawing upon traditions of craftsmanship as well as commercial production, he positions simple industrial products as symbols for broader ideas about production, value, and function. His ‘Lamp Series’ (2008–ongoing), for example, draws upon material research, color theory, and formal relationships to create ‘designer’ light fixtures from plastic containers. He engages DIY culture to pointedly reflect a contemporary marketplace phenomenon: the selling of premium ‘unfinished’ goods that outsource the work of finishing to the consumer.

Light sources appeared in Lyutakov’s standout 2023 exhibition held at Secession, Vienna, which featured over a hundred lava lamps arranged in grids made from simple laboratory equipment. Titled 1 Million Random Numbers, the installation referred to the way the forms created by the lamps’ ‘lava’ mirror the perfect random values required for robust encryption in cybersecurity, linking 1960s counterculture, space-age optimism, and later techno-dystopias within alluring object-images.

Lyutakov’s installations hint at utility yet exist solely for contemplation, setting up a deliberate tension between mass production and bespoke craftsmanship. His most famous – or infamous – work, Way of the sand, made for the Bulgarian Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale – created controversy in his home country for its inclusion of what appeared to be Ikea Pokal tumblers. In fact, the glasses were ‘artisanal’ – produced at small scale from local materials for the domestic market in Vietnam, where they are used to serve beer. Their form, derived from Western modernism, is produced rapidly and inexpensively using basic blowing techniques and recycled glass from broken windows. The formal similarities between the Vietnamese and Ikea glasses mask the vast inequalities in labor and material costs and confuse the value conventionally ascribed to ‘handmade’ vs. ‘mass produced.’ Ironically, the ensuing furor was blind to this, leading to Lyutakov being accused of defrauding Bulgaria’s ministry of culture by using cheap Ikea glasses. The allegations missed the crucial point: The imported Vietnamese glasses were even cheaper.

Alex Macedo (b. 1995, Ettelbruck, Luxembourg)
By Lauren Turton

Four metal nails appear as glistening intrusions on an ambiguous, ombré ground (s.t., 2025). Humble yet mesmerizing, they are rendered with a near-ritualistic dedication to light and shadow. They may simply represent a fascination with studio materials or allude to sacred wounding, as seen with the pierced figures that proliferate in Catholic imagery.

Alex Macedo’s paintings unfold with a quiet intensity, inviting sustained viewing rather than instant consumption – a welcome break in our image-saturated culture. Having landed his first solo show at Vienna’s Gianni Manhattan gallery in 2024, only a year after graduating from the city’s University of Applied Arts, Macedo sits among a growing wave of representational artists that hold firm allegiance to classical painting methods. He frames this not as an exclusive or rarefied pursuit, but as a visual idiom he believes is broadly legible. Oil painting functioned in his Catholic-Portuguese upbringing as a shared semiotic system – a language encountered not only in museums but in everyday spaces of devotion. It is, Macedo suggests, a mode of looking and understanding that is accessible both to those versed in European art histories and to working-class communities whose engagement with images remains entangled with the rhythms of worship.

This dedication to the mastery of traditional techniques is simultaneously one of homage and irony as Macedo questions today’s objects of devotion. In his early series, he drew inspiration from Flemish still life, allowing fragments appropriated from masterworks to surface in his own compositions. These appear alongside symbolic motifs drawn from lived experience – from kitsch religious trinkets, football paraphernalia, and fabrics to the emblems of luxury fashion houses, a reference to the tensions implicit in the idea of ‘European made’ in the context of Portugal, a major center of textile production.

Incorporating trompe-l’oeil technique, Macedo expands the vernacular of ‘sacred,’ reanimating a painting tradition that spans classes and cultural boundaries. Moving with a kind of intuitive choreography between tradition and contemporaneity, he aspires to democratize a genre typically confined to the gilded frames of grand museum collections. His compositions draw from, then extend beyond, the vantage point of personal narrative, gently inviting contemplation of the layered complexity of representation.

Ursula Mayer (b. 1970, Ried im Innkreis, Austria)
By Kai Philip Trausenegger

What remains when the powers that keep us in check cease to exist? Ursula Mayer stages a world where definitions, categories, sex, and conventions are stripped of their meaning, giving us carte blanche to reexperience the raw sensation of being human, freed, even briefly, from all societal and systemic boundaries. 

‘But We Loved Her’ read the floor-set neon that gave the artist’s 2013 show at Belvedere 21 its title – a fragment lifted from a banner seen in the crowds at the funeral procession for the former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Alongside humming analogue projectors, fabric screens, and photographs referencing the body-machines of the late sculptor Bruno Gironcoli, custom-built metal display structures elevated objects into pseudo-archaeological artifacts. Disembodied garments and fluid glass sculptures appeared as seductive fragments, staged, like the banner text, as the residues of neoliberal indoctrination.

In other projects, the artist has worked with AI poems written in Sanskrit, holographic digital hearts, and complex, industrial, pump-driven water installations, intertwining machines and living organisms. Witnessing Mayer’s prophetic visions of a posthuman cosmology feels like entering a sci-fi film in the making. Her installations grant us a view behind the scenes, exposing the sets, costumes, and props that place us, the audience, on the other side of the fantasy and underlining our collective entanglement in a system that manages to seduce and exploit us at the same time. How do we live with the ambiguity of writing protest letters on our iPhones, or with the pressure to be productive while making work that critiques over-productivity? Mayer’s practice turns precisely these contradictions into material.

Whether by working with highly aestheticized transgender performers, who wander the abstract landscapes of Medea (2013) and Atom Spirit (2017), or by deconstructing language to playfully counter Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy –Gonda (2012) – Mayer creates a reality where categorization is arbitrary. Instead, she summons a primordial, hyper-fluid state of pure potential that precedes the act of becoming. It is a body of work that appears highly political yet consistently resists the stabilizing language of activism. Instead, it moves toward a spiritual, almost esoteric, dismantling of the world as we know it, asking what might emerge once the old structures finally fall.

Antoinette Zwirchmayr (b. 1989, Salzburg, Austria)
By Olesia Shuvarikova

Antoinette Zwirchmayr is primarily known as a film director whose work has been shown at major international festivals, including the Berlinale and the Toronto International Film Festival. More recently, though, she has begun to show at art institutions and galleries – her 2023 presentation at Galerie Eva Presenhuber was curated by the artist Tobias Pils – contexts that have allowed her to more deliberately stage the physicality of her chosen medium.

Describing her films as having no beginning or end, she creates dreamlike moving images to drift away from and return to, outside the confines of linear narration. The scenes are carefully staged and function as autonomous images; bodies and objects combine in precise compositions alongside choreographed movements. Yet this careful orchestration does not result in a hermetic image, primarily because the tactile surface of Zwirchmayr’s medium – mostly 16mm film – engages viewers on an immediate, sensory level. The grainy footage, already presaging its own eventual decay, lingers on recurring elements of transience – fruit, water, and flesh – reminding us of the inescapable passage of time.

In many of Zwirchmayr’s films, symmetrical compositions and seductive forms and colors coexist closely with disturbing elements. In YAHNEYAHNE (2025), an idyllic scene of children picking ripe pears from a tree eventually shifts to the image of a drowned body in a river, the water’s surface glittering in the sun. In Land ohne Worte (Land Without Words, 2024), figures in long white garments rhythmically move through a monochrome set of theatrical staircases while reciting the text of Dea Loher’s 2007 theater piece of the same name as a kind of ritual recitation. At moments, the continuous movement in the otherworldly space is interrupted by close-ups: a woman’s face with a knife suspended a few centimeters from her eye; a head isolated on a sterile white surface as blood slowly seeps from an ear.

Loher’s play revolves around the enduring question of art’s limitations in the face of brutal realities. In Zwirchmayr’s handling, beautiful images are repeatedly disturbed by latent violence, making her work inherently ambivalent while suggesting that danger often lurks in the most seductive forms.