Venues
Galerie Eva Presenhuber
© Tobias Pils, Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich / Vienna. Photo: Jorit Aust
Galerie Eva Presenhuber is pleased to present Happy Days, the gallery’s seventh solo exhibition with the Austrian artist Tobias Pils.
Happy Days
This exhibition consists of 2 Triptychs (Happy Days, A Projection), a family of eight paintings and one bronze.
It might be the most intimate thus far.
Being a body.
Being part of a bigger body. A group, maybe.
Vis a Vis.
Shared consciousness whilst being together. Whilst being apart.
Togetherness and Loneliness.
Being held and holding each other.
Being reflected and mirrored in the opposite.
If there is a distance (and there is a lot of it), it’s a distance from proximity.
I am Us.
It is about fragility, tenderness and vulnerability.
Some of these figures have faces without eyes, no mouth, no nose, etc.
A nobody who is somebody.
A blank surface for the viewer. For projection.
A possibility to get rid of my own persona.
A possibility for the painter to get rid of my own persona.
The painting is just a painting.
The painting process (act of painting) is the ultimate transformation- the moment of the unpredictable.
Painting is time and dissolves the concept of time at once.
I must live through a whole life with a painting so that it can be born.
A found egg.
Tobias Pils, April 2024
Tobias Pils was born 1971 in Linz, AT, and lives and works in Vienna, AT. In 2020, Pils’ commissioned fresco, Alpha, Omega & Infinity, was unveiled in the Renzo Piano-designed École Normale Supérieure (ENS) Paris-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, FR. Recent solo exhibitions in museums include Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, DE (permanent installation) (2020); Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop, DE (2018); Kunsthalle Krems, Krems an der Donau, AT (2017); Le Consortium, Dijon, FR (together with Michael Williams) (2017); Chinati Foundation, John Chamberlain Building, Marfa, TX, US (2016); and Wiener Secession, Vienna, AT (2013). Recent group exhibitions include Museo Picasso in Málaga, ES (2023); Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, AT (2021–2022); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, DE (2020–2021); Musée Picasso, Paris, FR (2020); Spritmuseum, Stockholm, SE (2019); Le Consortium Collection, Le Consortium, Dijon, FR (2018); Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO, US (2018); 21er Haus, Vienna, AT (2017); and Art Basel Unlimited, Basel, CH (2016).
8005 Zurich
© Shara Hughes, Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich / Vienna. Photo: Stan Narten, JSP Art Photography
Hughes’s paintings are about painting as much as about nature, of trees grown not in soil but sprouted, as if sui generis, from the sluice of underpainting. In Tree Farm, they flaunt their inventiveness, offering the comparative play of difference within a serial format: one tall tree per vertical canvas. Each painting seems to harbor its own light source, palette, and temperature, cultivating within these distinct atmospheres specimens that arc to the physical edges of supports as if heliotropic, crown their enclosures, or fall to the loam where undergrowth rises to meet the detumescent branches.
8001 Zurich