Pirmin Blum works with found-footage material drawn from industry, business, and the internet, which he recontextualizes through processes of montage and transformation. In doing so, he demonstrates that artistic competence today presupposes a confident engagement with the media of mass culture — such as advertising, television, and websites — without this standing in contradiction to an individual mode of expression. He was born in Lucerne in 1969, lives and works in Vienna, and studied art and digital media at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 1999 to 2005.

Gunter Damisch (1958–2016) was an Austrian painter, graphic artist, and sculptor, and is regarded as one of the defining representatives of the “Neue Wilde” (New Wilds). He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna under Max Melcher and Arnulf Rainer and, from 1998 onward, served as Professor of Graphic Arts at the same institution. His body of work includes large-scale paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptural works in bronze, wood, and ceramics. Characteristic of his practice are densely layered, intensely colorful visual worlds in which organic forms, dot-like structures, and symbolic figures - such as the “Flimmers,” “Steher,” or “Köpfer” - move across the picture plane. Damisch understood his art as an exploration of inner and outer landscapes - between microcosm and macrocosm, between order and chaotic movement. Among other honors, he received the Otto Mauer Prize, the Max Weiler Prize, and the Prize of the City of Vienna. Gunter Damisch lived and worked in Vienna and the Mostviertel region of Lower Austria.

Franz Grabmayr (*1927 in Pfaffenberg, Carinthia; †2015 in Vienna) was an Austrian painter whose work is distinguished by an elemental and physically experienced visual language. After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna under Robin Christian Andersen and Herbert Boeckl, Grabmayr developed a distinctive gestural and expressive style of painting during the 1960s. His artistic practice repeatedly led him directly into nature - to places where earth, light, and movement converge. His so-called Fire Paintings, created in the Waldviertel region from the 1980s onward, are among his most significant works. For these, he mounted canvases onto a specially modified tractor from which he painted burning tree stumps. Built up with thick layers of paint, often applied with his bare hands, these works are immediate documents of heat, rhythm, and transformation. For Grabmayr, painting became a performative act - a physical confrontation with the surface of the canvas itself.

Simon Iurino, born in 1986 in Bolzano, Italy, is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Vienna, Austria. He studied in the master class for object sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Urbino, Italy. He subsequently completed a one-year program at the renowned Central Saint Martins Academy in London, United Kingdom. The artist completed his studies in a master class in text-based sculpture under the well-known professor Heimo Zobernig, with whom Iurino continued to collaborate for several years. Iurino’s work encompasses a wide range of media, from architectural interventions and installations to sculpture and painting. Across all these forms, his practice is connected through an engagement with the formal language of modernism. In doing so, the artist seeks to make the image support material itself - canvas, paper - part of the artwork’s content. An important element in Simon Iurino’s sculptures, both in large and small formats, is the use of industrial materials such as copper pipes or extruded ceramic tubes. The sculptures are bent, twisted, and wind their way upward through ceramic screen prints, enamel, and oxides.

Franco Kappl (*1962 in Klagenfurt) lives and works in Vienna and Klagenfurt. Between 1982 and 1989, he studied painting under Arnulf Rainer at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and later continued his education at the Royal College of Art in London. Kappl’s works are predominantly large-scale and are characterized by dynamic, gestural, and abstract compositions in which contrasts between light and dark, as well as structured fields of color, play a dominant role. He understands painting as a form of creative exploration of color: lines, surfaces, light, and shadow - rather than representation - are at the center of his practice, placing the medium itself in focus.

Nikolaus Moser (*1956 in Spittal an der Drau) is an Austrian painter who lives and works in Vienna. Moser studied under Carl Unger and Adolf Frohner at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. A number of his oil paintings are created on an alpine pasture, where Moser retreats every summer. At times, he mixes earth, stones, or ash into the layered oil paint, giving the works the dimensional quality of reliefs.

A. R. Penck (1939–2017), born Ralf Winkler in Dresden, was one of the most important German artists of the postwar period. He developed a distinctive visual language strongly characterized by signs, symbols, and archaic-looking figures. His works combine painting, drawing, and theory into a complex system of visual communication. In East Germany, Penck worked for many years outside the official art scene and was under state surveillance. In 1980, he moved to West Germany, where he quickly gained international recognition.

Alexander Ruthner, born in 1982 in Vienna, “doesn’t hold back” when it comes to painting. His works, ranging from colorful floral patterns to luminous group scenes, reflect a controlled sense of contemporaneity and a sharp observation of the events shaping our world today. “I want to create mental gardens,” Ruthner says in his own words. “People should feel free to wander through my paintings. No associations are forbidden.” Ruthner’s landscapes have been exhibited in London, Berlin, Los Angeles, and Vienna. His works are characterized by unusual perspectives and a distinctive, rapid painterly technique. “I appreciate a certain power in my work. I don’t want to suppress that at all.” After periods of study in Athens (“a truly important stage of my life”) and Düsseldorf, he was drawn to Los Angeles, where he was impressed by the positive atmosphere and the great optimism of the art scene. “Everyone somehow works together there; there’s very little criticism.” With clear gestures, his painting expresses what he thinks - or rather, what he wants viewers to think. But does he really want that? “No. I don’t prescribe anything. The language of my painting should be understandable and feel good. I say that with a certain skepticism.”

Walter Vopava (1948 in Vienna) is an Austrian painter and representative of the “New Abstraction.” He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna under Maximilian Melcher and lives and works in Vienna, Berlin, and Lower Austria. During the 1980s, Vopava evolved from figuration toward pure abstraction. His large-scale works are characterized by strong contrasts between light and dark and by a reduced, meditative visual language. Distinctive elements include flat black bars, luminous veils of color, and an open, process-oriented approach to painting in which color, light, and space become central vehicles of expression - beyond representational reference. Among other honors, he received the Prize of the City of Vienna and the Austrian Art Prize.

Herbert Brandl (1959–2025) is regarded as one of the central figures of Austrian painting since the 1980s. His works move between abstraction and allusions to landscape. In his practice, color, gesture, and materiality form an autonomous field of tension in which perception and emotion coexist on equal terms. Brandl was less interested in the motif itself than in the physical experience of painting. Large-scale canvases, dense layers of paint, and eruptive movements characterize his visual language. Mountains, mist, and horizons repeatedly emerge - not as representations of nature, but as its condensation. Alongside painting, he also created prints and sculptures. His works were exhibited internationally, including at documenta IX and the Venice Biennale. Brandl taught at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and influenced generations of younger artists. His oeuvre stands for a radical and sensual renewal of painting in the 21st century.

As an African conceptual artist working within a contemporary context, Louise Deininger, through her research-based practice, connects collective memory, materiality, and meaning in acts of decolonial reclamation and identity formation. Through a hybrid interdisciplinary approach, she works with a variety of materials that pulse with traces of past lives. These include her inherited colonial medium of acrylic paint on canvas, as well as earth and elephant dung — the latter connected to her clan’s totem animal. Alongside the reuse and recontextualization of consumer waste and found objects that critique the excesses of consumer culture, she incorporates traditional bark cloths, tea bags steeped in histories of colonial exploitation, beads, cowrie shells, kanga fabrics, and crochet thread associated with spiritual and ancestral practices.

Robert Indiana (1928–2018) was an American artist closely associated with Pop Art. After studying at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Skowhegan School in Maine, and the Edinburgh College of Art, he settled in New York in 1954, where he became part of the Coenties Slip artist community alongside figures such as Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin. He became internationally known for his clear, typographic and geometric works featuring words (“LOVE,” “EAT,” “HOPE”) and numbers (“Numbers 1–0”), realized in paintings, prints, and large-scale sculptures. His iconic LOVE composition - with the L above the O and the V above the E, the “O” tilted - first appeared in 1964 on a Museum of Modern Art Christmas card and later became a Cor-Ten steel sculpture (1970) at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

As an artist, one inevitably develops relationships with different materials, with the ways they behave and what they are capable of articulating. In Julian Jankovic’s work in particular, materiality is broadly defined, among other things as the capacity of a system. All systems, from plastic sheeting to the finished artwork, exist in interaction with the world and, under certain conditions, express their specific qualities in particular ways. Within this expanded understanding of materiality, even states that we traditionally describe as immaterial are granted a form of essentiality, which in Jankovic’s work becomes visible through causal relationships. Elasticity, resilience, and porosity characterize and limit the morphological range of possibilities that the material - and ultimately the artwork itself - can occupy. In other words, Jankovic assigns matter an active role in the creation of its own form. The resulting element of chance and unpredictability - perhaps even a newly emerging stubbornness of the material - is not experienced by the artist as a loss of control, but rather, quite literally, as a form of elasticity within his creative process.

Karl Karner (*1973 in Feldbach, Styria) works within an open field between sculpture, performance, and spatial installation. His artistic practice is shaped by a process-oriented approach that questions classical notions of form and places the body - both as subject and as medium - at the center of his work. Karner studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna under Heimo Zobernig and is also a trained art caster. In his work, this technical expertise meets a pronounced interest in instability, transition, and the unfinished.

Zanele Muholi, born in 1972 in Durban, South Africa, completed a photographic training program at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg and continued their studies at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. Muholi’s artistic practice, regarded as one of the most influential and internationally recognized within the contemporary art scene, has received numerous prestigious awards. In their works and exhibitions, both nationally and internationally, Muholi is particularly dedicated to the representation of homosexuality within the Black community. The ongoing series Faces and Phases, initiated in 2006, is a collection of black-and-white portraits of lesbian women, transgender, and non-binary individuals, now comprising more than 250 portraits of diverse subjects. Through these profound and deeply moving images, Muholi creates a documentary archive of the everyday realities and struggles of these communities.

Markus Prachensky (1932–2011) was one of the most important Austrian artists of abstract painting and a central figure of European Informel. His works are characterized by a powerful, gestural visual language in which movement, rhythm, and energy play an essential role. Particularly distinctive is his intense use of the color red, which in many works becomes the dominant form of expression. Prachensky understood painting as an immediate physical act and as a spontaneous dialogue between artist and canvas. Numerous travels, especially to the Mediterranean region, Spain, and Italy, had a lasting influence on his work and are reflected in series inspired by architecture, landscape, and light. Despite their abstraction, his paintings retain a strong emotional presence and a clear internal structure. Prachensky’s large-format works were often created through decisive, rapid gestures and testify to a consistently uncompromising artistic vision.

Thomas Vava, born in 1992 in Kalongo, Uganda, and raised in Gulu City, lives and works between Vienna and his homeland. Since 2021, he has been studying Contextual Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, first under Hans Ashley Scheirl and currently with Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann. Shortly before beginning his studies, Vava moved from Uganda to Vienna, yet his artistic identity remains closely tied to the history of Northern Uganda. Having grown up in a region shaped by a prolonged civil war, Vava addresses the collective and personal wounds of his Acholi community in his work. His art is rooted in the vibrant culture of Acholi dancers, whose powerful movements resonate throughout his large-scale works. Vava’s recent works move within the tension between painting and sculptural object. Using cardboard structures covered with recycled plastic materials, he creates tactile, almost corporeal works that often extend beyond the traditional format of the canvas. Instead, fragments of plastic float freely in space, capturing light and movement and lending the works a dynamic, living quality. Their full forms only reveal themselves from a distance, inviting a layered and multifaceted perception.

Otto Zitko (*1959 in Linz) is regarded as one of the most distinctive figures in contemporary abstract painting. His works emerge from an immediate, physical process of mark-making in which lines spread across the surface in dense structures, generating a strong visual tension. Zitko deliberately rejects classical compositional principles and fixed pictorial centers, allowing the painting to grow directly out of the moment itself. The works develop like visual records of movement, rhythm, and energy, often oscillating between controlled placement and a consciously embraced loss of control. Color does not appear as decoration, but rather as an intense means of condensation and amplification. Zitko frequently works in series and over extended periods of time on groups of works, allowing his visual language to evolve continuously. Another characteristic feature is the way his works engage with space and at times extend beyond the traditional panel painting. Drawing and painting merge into an independent, open visual world that resists singular interpretation and, precisely through this openness, unfolds a lasting presence.