1978 born in Mödling, Niederösterreich (A) 2006 - 2011 Study of Fine Arts at Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna (with Gunter Damisch, Daniel Richter, Harun Farocki) Prizes 2011 Pfann-Ohmann Preis Kunstpreis Parz 2010 Laureate of the Fohn Scholarship Roter Teppich für Junge Kunst Artist in Residence 2013 Seattle: Thompson, USA, 2013 Helsinki: Rastila, Finland, 2013 2012 Grieskirchen: Galerie Schloß Parz, Österreich Sao Paulo: Fundacao Armando Alvares Penteado (FAAP), Brasilien Rio de Janeiro: EAV Parque Lage, Brasilien 2011 Mallorca: CCA Andratx, Spain Publications 2013 "Drowned Presence" – Frey Contemporary Art (monograph) "some roads to somewhere" - Hilger BROTKunsthalle 2012 "Salve Europa Kunstpreis - Salve Art Gallery 2011 "Renaissance" - Galerie Schloss Parz 2010 "Affiliations" - Salve Art Gallery 2009 "Wo der Pfeffer wächst" – Kro Art Contemporary

Solo-Exhibitions 2019 Galerie Voss, Düsseldorf Museum Angerlehner, Wels Bildraum 07, Vienna 2018 Beauty of Complexity, Complexity Science Hub, Palais Strozzi, Vienna Balances, Brauneis Klauser Prändl, Vienna 2017 Considering the Circular Topology of Clouds, Hollerei Galerie, Vienna Im Salon, Galerie Schloss Parz, Grieskirchen 2016 The Rise and Fall of Transformative Hopes and Expectations, Galerie Voss, Düsseldorf 2014 "Calibrating Aesthetics", Galerie Voss, Düsseldorf "Mapping Inexact Thoughts", Galerie Frey, Salzburg 2013 Neue Arbeiten auf Papier, Galerie Wolfrum, Wien "Vow of Silence", Galerie Voss, Düsseldorf "Origins of Semantics", Galerie Frey, Vienna 2012 "Schwimmen wie Hund", mo.ë, Vienna "Promised Burden", EAV Parque Lage, Rio, Brazil "Flüchtigkeit der Gegenwart", Kunst am See, Seeteufel Leipzig "Aktuelle Zeichnungen", Galerie Wolfrum, Vienna "Salon", mo.ë, Vienna 2011 "Gegenwart der Flüchtigkeit", Art Gallery Leipzig "Everyday", La Galerie Bellechasse, Paris "Eternally Tormented" (Von der Unmöglichkeit, Fuß zu fassen), Akademie der bildenden Künste, Wien "Past Understanding", Galerie Plamínek, Brno "Paradise Lost", La Galerie Bellechasse, Paris 2010 "Der Gute Maler Fresse Ständig", Sotheby’s Artist Quarterly, Vienna "Affiliations", Art Gallery Leipzig, Leipzig "Glaube Liebe Hoffnung", Roter Teppich, Vienna " ausrauchen, ausrichten", Brick5, Vienna Group-Exhibitions 2019 Fake, Fame, Fail and Fear, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna HyperAccumulators, Pelham Arts Center, New York 2018 , Galerie Schloss Parz, Grieskirchen 2017 KUNST_KOORDINATEN, Museum Angerlehner, Thalheim bei Wels 2015 Roter Teppich 10 Jahresausstellung, Künstlerhaus Wien 2015 Nach Picasso, Forum Frohner, Krems Dis|Order - Vom Wesen dynamischer Systeme, Kunstverein Baden 2014 Remembering Tomorrow, Kunstverein Baden, Baden “Resemblance”, Wolfram Productions at Smith Tower, Seattle “3 under 36“ , Galerie Schloss Parz, Grieskirchen Remembering Tomorrow“, Kunstverein Baden, Baden 2013 "Principium Privatum – Projected Sexualities", Vienna Art Week, mo.ë, Wien "Das gute Bild", Palais Kinsky, Wien "AAAAR – ARTISTS ACTIVISTS A(U)CTION AGAINST RACISM", Prospekthof, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna "some roads to somewhere" Brot Kunsthalle, Vienna "Vienna Calling I" – Masterworks Ambacher Contemporary, Munich 2012 "Salve Europa Kunstprei"s (Ausstellung der Nominierten), Salve Art Gallery, Leipzig "Works on Paper", Galerie Frey, Salzburg "12. Kunstauktion" Neunerhaus, MAK, Vienna "Montag ist erst übermorgen" – Junge Kunst auf Papier, Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna "Handelnde und leidende Helden" – neodramatische Spielzunst, Kunstverein Mistelbach "Megacool 3.0", k-haus, Vienna "Malerei", Galerie Schloß Parz "die weisse ab-haus-verkaufs-kunstschau", Das Weisse Haus – Satellit, Argentinierstrasse 11, Vienna "Salve", Kunstraum Connex/salve art gallery, Leipzig "Artists Activist A(u)ction Against Racism", Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna 2011 "Inside/Outside", Kro Art Gallery, Vienna Kollektiv Akt V (Thursday, September 8th – Friday, "Art Stays, Ptuj, Slovenia "Gallery Opening", Art Gallery "Invisible", Kunstverein Baden "Before The Movies, Paintings Were Like The Movies", mo.ë Vienna "Art Austria" (with Kro Art Contemporary), Museum Leopold "Wem die Stunde schlägt", NÖ Dokumentationszentrum für moderne Kunst, St. Pölten "Wohnzimmerbiennale" (Livingroom Biannual) "Koppa Koppa, Galerie am Schillerplatz "Renaissance, Galerie Schloss Parz "Sharing a room", Krokus Galeria, Bratislava "Attitudes and Appropriation, Diplomarbeit Nathalie Koger, Akademie der bildenden Künste, Wien Rundgang der Akademie der bildenden Künste, Wien 2011 " Words. ARTmART", Künstlerhaus, Vienna "Impromptu Tête-à-Tête", Galerie 114, Vienna "Sauna 2010," Brut, Vienna "Zwischen Innen und Außen", Das Weisse Haus, Vienna "5th International Student Triennial", Marmara University, Istanbul "Kultursalon 24/7", Ausarten, Vienna "Bild. Rundgang 2010", academy of fine arts, Vienna 2009 Wo der Pfeffer wächst. Kro Art Gallery, Vienna Open Call 2009. academy of fine arts, Vienna Beyond (10/Kunstakt). Fellner Wratzfeld Partner, Vienna 2007 "Im Zentrum am Rand", Weinstadtmuseum Krems (NöART) "Ego(t)is",. Projektwerkstatt SOHO Ottakring, Vienna

In the Studio Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen It is already dark, and cold too: winter. There is no name on the doorbell. From the front door, I can see the traffic of the nearby Gürtel rolling by. I find a mobile phone number and am let into the former factory building. Artists have settled here. We walk through a hall, an improvised exhibition space. In the back to the right is the studio. A cube, perfect for large formats. Naked brick walls. The desk with a computer and several books appear lost amidst the vast surrounding space. From the sofa I can see the two walls against which large paintings are leaning. And now, to speak... Hours, days and weeks of work are stored on these canvases. How is it possible to spontaneously tackle what is at hand? The works need time to unfold. “How are things?” “How was your last exhibition?” “Thank you for your e-mail.”—Buying time. While facing my conversation partner, I glance at the paintings at the edge of my perceptual field. Artificially shifting the focus of my attention; technique of casually looking, giving the paintings enough space to express themselves. We do not have to start from square one. I see works that I already know from conversations at the Academy of Fine Arts: “Tranquilada”. Six people and a pool with fish. The terrain sharply defined; two trees stand at the edge of a plateau, in which a bright blue pool is embedded. The dramaturgy of color sets abstract points of focus and leaves large areas apparently untouched. It floats like a spaceship. The realistic parts of the scenery appear to be cut out from cloudy abstraction. The Ukrainian painter, Vasily Tsagolov once described his realism as “zombie painting”: Actually, painting is supposedly long dead. But because it is dead, painting is—in its resurrected form—all the more suitable for conceptual purposes. Like photography, where everything also appears without there being an exchange between material, form and content. Because after all, to paint means to be committed to an open process. Content should develop from the self-correction that occurs in dealing with forms. As such, painting successfully provides art with an exemplary model of connection between artist subject, formal structure and meaning. To look at paintings then is a playback: Following the traces in the painting, the viewer can simulate the painting’s originating processes. But, after 500 years of painting, the fortuitous has become routine. Every gesture can be ordered into a system of languages and styles. Individuality can no longer be expressed through process and form, authorship can no longer be defined. Today is the era of realisms: Images of everyday life are cited in paintings. They integrate the social circumstances from which they stem into art and thereby turn artists into social creatures. Tsagolov is right: Painting has forfeited its processuality; it has become a standardized procedure. Hence the journey of the images is what becomes important, images that now become charged with multiple social connotations. The creative process now consists in strategies of recycling, montage, disassociation,—in a manner in which the artist perpetuates the circulation of images. The whole time I am staring at the old man beside me, who holds up the cross in a dramatic gesture. Why? The figure is only alluded to: fragmentary lines suggest legs, elbows and a hand, they delineate the raised left hand. In striking contrast to the stained yellow ground are the naturalistically painted walking stick, head, and cross. I sit back and measure: The man is as tall as I am. Life-sized. We discuss the necessity towards large formats. The color space is the mist chamber in which images can materialize. Or rather: a projection surface, upon which the images are captured. Perhaps it is wrong to speak of painting, I say. Perhaps this is a method for meddling with the circulation of images. Perhaps the colored walls are the image’s catalysts; the fragments force the viewer to perceive the motif, to fill in the gaps. A performance of perception, whose stage is that which is painted. Painters do not like texts. What happens in painting only clumps up when it is written. The stuttering act of speaking—Cocteau once praised the “limping pace of poetry”—however, still provides a free space for the construction of meaning. One does not have to mean what is said. Yet texts are products, particularly in catalogues. They do not even have to be read. It would be good to, even while writing, also be able to hold onto the flow of images. Since this is where the images now arrive after having left the canvas: the pathetic old man, the pensive little girl with a blanket in her mouth, the screaming angel with the Turkish headscarf. Has this not all become a bit pathetic, I ask. And I mean the motif of the pietà. What had not occurred to me was this: Even those scenes, whose compositions draw upon conventions that have been established over the course of hundreds of years of history, are dismantled here into moments of perception through the fragmentary execution in the painting. “Dénouement” means resolution. The graphic treatment of the motif yields the representation of a pietà. The painterly accentuation dissects it into five different moments of perception: a bent leg, a young girl’s head and the dead with arms and hands, a fascinated boy looking on, the fragmentary bust and forearm of a young woman holding the fading body, finally the triad of shoes, a kiss and a bird’s head. Some of the forms, like the surreal bird’s head on the human body, are indebted to the dynamic power with which various views are sent off on a journey. The isolated motifs are themselves “indicators”. Productive conversations. Ideas emerge, some get instantly discarded. Hypotheses develop about what is done and what perhaps remains to be done. One is doubtlessly only productive when questioning oneself. One could suppose that abstraction in these paintings is separated too explicitly from figuration; that figure and ground are not interwoven through the practice of painting. As a result, the advice would be: Turn off the computer. Stop editing found images with Photoshop only to transfer them to the canvas! If images merge with the painting’s surface, if they are supposed to result from the painting process, then one should allow to engage in this event. But then I remember Tsagolov’s story. The “undead painting“ knows no authentic processes anymore. Hence one can confidently simulate them. Painting as a “new medium“. The image is more projection than product. Painters are no longer identifiable in the traces of painting. They are directors of image sequences: Where does this motif of the old man with the cross come from? With what other images in the viewer’s mind should this scene collide? When is the image released from the territory of art? Does the image retain a memory for its continued journey? In the “Tsagolov-model”, the computer could be an important phase on the way towards a new image. Perhaps this process should in fact not be abandoned. Should one not rather in this other sort of painting add as many stages as possible, along which the image may then be translated? Prolong the course to heighten the effect? Maybe painting is now being transformed as such: The courses of images from our everyday life and mass media are redirected into the autonomous area of the arts. To send them on a journey of transformations—performance, photography, video, drawing, painting—and change their charge, only to then release them once again into the world of the quotidian. The user of the image takes the place of the author: whether as consumer or artist. Images transform into agents that then change their recipients. Theories are only tools for painters. They must prove themselves in the task of organizing the logic of painting. And to think of painting as a social process is unusual. Gradually the focus becomes blurred. The cold is creeping into my bones... time to be on my way.