Painting human conditions.
My work specifically focuses on people in trauma recovery – using figurative strategies in drawing, painting and code. I’ve had solo exhibitions in the US, France, Spain, Germany, the Czech Republic and Austria.
The depicted people’s introspective gazes indicate inner communications to which viewers cannot at first listen in. In this respect, viewers tend to be excluded from certain aspects and dynamics of my works – like trauma survivors themselves, who, due to dissociation, at times are denied clear access to their bodies, memories and emotions – to their lives.
My oldest work shows people in vertigo: tumbling, falling, entering a life. Since then, the pieces visualize fragments of what it means to inhabit a body – showing blissful, chaotic, lonely, connected, and all other sorts of moments. Although the work’s visual modes keep changing, its emotional base remains highly connected throughout the years. It blends geometry and nature, combines analog and digital metaphors and processes, and repeatedly uses DNA structures to reference the basis of life: my work is about transformation as much as it is about vulnerability, and the spirituality of seemingly ordinary everyday moments.
The slide show below highlights some of my work; you can click on the image captions to open the accompanying series.
I programmed videogames at Rockstar Games before studying Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, which influenced the topic of my PhD thesis (painting and digital technologies). I live and work in Vienna/Austria, and collaborate with galleries in Austria, Germany and Spain.
I curated over thirty exhibitions since co-managing the transmedial art space mo.ë, and am the author of the ongoing “Handbook for Emerging Artists (over fourty chapters are online, with over 70k views as of 2024).
I hold lectures and workshops, most recently at “Klasse für Alle” at the University of Applied Arts — over the years, this happened at places like the Royal Institute of Art (Stockholm), Gage Academy of Art (Seattle), University of Northern Colorado, University of Applied Arts Vienna, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna or the New Rochelle High School (New York).
Next to my art practice, I am active in various projects that empower artists — by making art world dynamics transparent, and local art scenes more welcoming.
I studied Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna — in the classes of Daniel Richter, Harun Farocki and Gunter Damisch (2006-2011). Painting, film and graphics, reflecting my curiosity on various image creation and interrogation methods.
Throughout these years I eventually focused on storytelling within the medium of painting; I also began my Doctoral Thesis (PhD) on this topic, which changed into an ontological interrogation about “Painting and Digital Technologies” (Elisabeth von Samsonow, Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein, 2011-2015).
The PhD thesis led to my curatorial work and to art writing – but also got me to expand my analog works to include digital processes. Doing so meant to revisit, renew and reconnect with my programming past. It also required establishing new tools and processes, to make use of both analog and digital dynamics, and establish new visualities.
The final drawings and paintings that use such processes rarely show their underlying digital roots; these are often based on my self-coded prototyping environment (see image below). It enables image and video abstractions (based on the Processing programming environment), and a robotic plotting device to be used for rendering certain parts onto paper or canvas. This results in an analog figuration that’s natively based in geometric abstraction – while keeping an analog exterior.
