painting painting painting
in vienna vienna vienna

In my artistic practice, I deal primarily with plinths and altars, or rather all kinds of furniture pieces that are in some form related to religious practices. In these religious contexts I am mostly interested in those that function as carriers of relics / objects / artefacts. These carriers play a specific role in presenting the object at hand.
It is much less about concrete religious topics, more about the relations and interplay between the carrier and the object it is carrying.

In the book The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher refers to artefacts from science fiction novels as inorganic artefacts; objects whose purpose and meaning remain unclear. At the same time however, they derive their potential from this lack of clarity. It is significant to point out that these objects are subject to some kind of parasitic existence; They dwell in a dormant state, their true purpose having yet to be discovered.

This seeming ambivalence of non-abstract, yet unfathomable forms is a central axis in my artistic research. In my paintings I explore the relationships between the location, the substructure / carrier, and the presented object. Furthermore, I consciously employ motifs that will remain in a state of unclarity, obscurity, in regard to their origin and backstory. Although the object itself is not abstract in the traditional sense, its inherent vagueness pushes it into iconographic abstraction.


“ Pulp-horror, archaic science fiction and the darker aspects of folklore share a preoccupation with exhumation of or confrontation with ancient super-weapons categorised as Inorganic Demons or xenolithic artifacts. These relics or artifacts are generally depicted in the shape of objects made of inorganic materials (stone, metal, bones, souls, ashes, etc.). Autonomous, sentient and independent of human will, their existence is characterised by their forsaken status, their immemorial slumber and their provocatively exquisite forms. [...] Inorganic demons are parasitic by nature, they [...] generate their effects out of the human host, whether as an individual, an ethnicity, a society or an entire civilisation. “

— Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials