Karin Maria Pfeifer, Maria Grün, Michael Heindl, Ilona Tomo, Georg Wilbertz und Wolfgang Tragseiler.
18.3.25 – 11.4.2025, Künstlervereinigung MAERZ, Eisenbahngasse 20, Linz
I was invited to do the introductory talk about the new artists being presented in Galerie Maerz, Linz. I ended up delivering a kind of rough approximation of this text in German, but here is the more precise version in English for posterity:
Armoured Expression by 6 Sensitive, Caring Filter Systems
18.3.2025, 19.00 Uhr
Hi, it’s an honour to be invited here to give you a tour of the NEU in der Maerz. If you’re wondering why I’m standing in front of you – me too! I’m not a theorist, I’m an artist who also likes to write about art: about how the experience of someone else’s art makes me think and feel. I normally write for free, when I see something I like. This task is a bit different.
They’re funny things, group exhibitions. They’re never fully representative of any one idea, particularly if the organising principle is new membership. Like cross sections, they offer a sideways glimpse into different universes. But lucky for me, as soon as I talk to the creator, I almost always find ways to love the work.
The artists themselves all have much more precise, careful ways of voicing their practice in words than I do. Where it seemed fitting, I’ve plucked a few quotes from them. But you’ll have to talk to them to get to the core from their perspective. I think I’m here to summarise their works and kind of weave them all together from my perspective, (which is imagining positive shared futures!) For this exhibition I somehow got the best seat in the house. I could have lunch with four of them. I observed parts of the set up. I got to talk to them all at length and was allowed to ask questions that they felt obliged to answer in earnest, deep ways. To keep digging ‘til we got tired. It was fricking awesome!!!!!
We all talked in German. And then I am of course filtering that back into English, to get to the deeper parts of my brain. And then I have to filter them back into my piecemeal Upper Austrian dialect heavy Deutsch for you. Filtering is one of the themes I want to weave into this tour. The other one is armour. Whether I manage it, let’s see!
My Biggest Wish Rightnow:
My overriding wish for right now is that I wish the world was being run by sensitive, caring filter systems, who could navigate our past mistakes to lead us to a better future. It currently seems not to be being run like that. But within these walls are people who feel things about the way the world is turning and have tried to turn some of those feelings into things. Here tonight are 6 SCFSs, sensitive caring filter systems, the artists and their armours, here to protect themselves and others:
Karin Maria Pfeifer, Maria Grün, Michael Heindl, Ilona Tomo, Georg Wilbertz und Wolfgang Tragseiler.
Karin Maria Pfeifer:
Works and lives in Vienna and Lower Austria, University of Vienna, doctorate 95
Künstlerische Reinen: Paris, India, Israel/Palestine, Arlberg Hospice, Hamburg Frise, Hannover, Slovenia, Paliano, Rom, f.e.
Since 2008 Co-founder of the flat1_artspace in Vienna
“Fragmentierte Erinnerungen”: She says, “Ich beschäftige mich mit 2 großen Themenkomplexen einerseits mit feministischen Fragestellungen und andererseits mit dem Raum, seinen Grenzen und der Überschreitung dieser Grenzen.” Here Karin presents two sections taken from larger complexes, where the past and future intertwine. These larger collections from previous exhibitions are preserved in books that she makes to encase the work, the process, the catches of what seems to be a long, considered study into time and space.
Here in the gallery we find the actual pipes that her grandfather soldered (luten) together in the 1950s?, that were dug up from the under the floor of their family house during renovations. We also find the original wallpaper, though it’s not the actual wallpaper, rather the memory of a wallpaper from her childhood, taken from Oma and Opa’s walls. You can see it in the way the lines flimmer. They are not fully there. It gives me a bit of a shudder, like I’m almost able to step out of this reality into another one. The tiles bring me back to optical enjoyment in the now. Another excavation or remnant, they are solid, weird 3D things of great depth yet flat, watery. The photograph is another kind of fragment: the remains of dinner with the family. Karin’s children have recently left home. Her grandparents are gone. With all this knowledge, this flat spatial arrangement takes on all of these different dimensions. And in looking we can travel back and forth in time between different realities.
Why is this work here now? The original house from Oma and Opa was cheap, bought just after the war on the north side of the Danube. Cheap because THEY might come back. Karin’s grandmother always locked all the doors. And these feelings echo, vibrate, shimmer. THEY might come back again. The past and the future have recently started making loops we weren’t expecting. Grandma’s reality might become granddaughter’s. Though other futures flimmer too- the orange colour comes from their trip to the UK to pick their daughter up from Cambridge after her studies were finished. And from this elaborate horizontal meditation, like a book open on its side, we turn the page onto two skies, two moods, not oma and opa, but kind of. They bring out different possibilities of the times we are in. One doom laden, the other hopeful. Karin Maria Pfeifer’s SCFS (sensitive caring filter system) balances here before you, given by a woman holding both ends of the past and the future, aware that they only make the present for a tiny moment at a time. Glory and despair rub shoulders, their beauty in carefully arrangement fragments on the floor, dramatic upon the wall.
Maria Grün:
Lives and works in Retz and Vienna, Austria
Master of Arts/ Bakkalaurea of Philosophy
2001 – 2009 studied Sociology at University of Vienna/ Bakkalaurea of Philosophy
2010-2018 studied at University of Applied Arts: TransArts /Bachelor & master of Arts
2017 co-founded: “GOMO – Raum für zeitgenössische Kunst und Diskurs”
2017 Künstlerhaus membership and head of department of painting and graphics (team with Anke Armandi)
If you look at her website, you can see that Maria has been fascinated by machines for a long time. Here we are given three parts of the ongoing series, Metabolism_machine :
Organ – A form that knisters and pulsates, exposed for all to see. I think about stomachs, and tumors. I like the sound. I admire the craft.
LABEYE – An eye that beads you, then glances away, held in place by the detached hand of a medical orderly or doctor. You know it’s not alive, but you kind of want it to be.
Mollusk – An isolated breast – the nipple gives water instead of milk until it is empty. A meditation on motherhood or writers block? on having to perform a task without wanting to?
You can see Ron Mueck’s impossible giants and Erwin Wurm’s humourous bodies, dissected and minimized into a room with Mary Shelley after Igor just mopped the floor. There’s the scent of David Cronenberg in the disinfectant and the shadow of grimmer experiments performed in these parts back in the not so distant past form in the corners. One reads horror movie and museum exhibit with one tongue in cheek, knowing that the other, mechanical tongue is repeatedly licking the floor like a machine in the other room.
We see technology and the body interrogated and critiqued. The works, set on white tiles like a series of products or samples jars are sterile, grim, yet playful. The seperate-ness of each element seems to talk of the filters and divisions health institutions Carl Linnaeus started off in the 1700s that we maybe don’t want or need compartmentalising our bodies all the time. The surgical hand that caresses the animate flesh is cut off, dead – a schematic for a dispassionate doctor. Alongside this critique, there is also a fascination with the technical challenge to make something artificial that seems to be alive. This fascination stretches back beyond the Mechanical Turk of 1770 into the middle ages. Maria has picked up the baton Leonardo da Vinci handled when he sketched the designs for a knight in armour that could sit up, wave its arms and move its jaw. Arduinos and silicon casting techniques offer us new levels of realism and mimicry that Da Vinci would have painted another Mona Lisa for if he knew how much that one would sell. On the other side of the line stand the creepy attack dog robots already haunting a battlefield near you.
And behind it stands Maria with her big, beautiful grin, her armour that she can remain protected behind: Theory and craft. When we spoke about the work, Maria mentioned a neglected, soft interior that one doesn’t really see here. It’s there in its absence. One senses wounds hidden behind the armour of technical replication and mechanical success. One reflects on the successes and failures of the health systems that every family knows. One doesn’t ask more questions.
Michael Heindl:
Michael Heindl (born 1988 in Linz)
2007 – 2014 Studied at the university for applied arts in Vienna, department of painting 2011 Erasmus in Dublin 2011 – 2012 Study at the university for applied arts in Vienna, department of TransArts + Prizes and residencies and other cool stuff.
Michael creates meditations on now, processed through deeds and gatherings outside and unterwegs in the city. His careful, nuanced observations about small things pile up to say larger things. Here he presents a pot pourri of his processes, which, as with the others artists presented today, hint at a larger field of exploration.
Drawing From Nature (Episode 1) – The bird eats at the hand that feeds it until the hand that feeds it is gone and it balances on the spikes of steel designed to keep the birds away. We meddle with things and we don’t know when to stop. We appear to be helping but actually it’s a trap.
Correction With Invisible Hand – The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, filtered through only the letters that appear on Euro Bank notes, so that the whole text become gobbledegook – blödsinn, nonsense. The Nonsense that we must all live by. The text is hand drawn in cheerful colours. Degraded by the banks that trotzdem money finden kann, Waffen zu kaufen. A cheerful message of despair. This one somehow captures how I feel everyday, we must go on despite the fact that everything is mad.
The last work from Michael leads us to the second room:
Bugs killed by cars, coated in the glass swept from the Kreuzungen after accidents. So that they glimmer and glint in the light – Windshield Diamonds. Note the careful attention to the detail of the displays, like the rest of them, made sculptural and to be a continuation of the work. Made by the man who doesn’t know when to stop. These sick, beautiful little offerings to the gods.
Each work is a loop of irony and action. They parody the impossibility of being an active human alive in today’s over destructive times, highlighting the stasis we find ourselves in and the traps present in every move we make. These are works made on the move by a person trying to make connections to the city, only coming back to the gallery to share his actions.
In case you were wondering, Michael started his art career doing grafitti as a teenager. Spraying stuff, getting up to mischief. It seems the impulse never really left him. Next up for Michael, an exhibition with the current minister of Finance in September.
Ilona Ágnes Tömő:
Geboren 1975 in Kőszeg (Ungarn). Studium an der Kunstuniversität Linz, Textil, Kunst & Design bei Marga Persson. Seit 1996 präsentiert sie ihre Arbeiten in zahlreichen Einzel- und Gruppenausstellungen in Ungarn, Österreich und Frankreich. Sie Arbeitet in öffentlichem und privatem Besitz. Lebt in Linz und arbeitet seit März 2024 im „Energie AG Atelier“
To talk to Ilona about her art is to hear about the journey: she started out as making screen prints, moved to Linz to study Textiles, spent many long hours working at the Landestheatre doing Buhnenbild – she became a mother. Like many of us, she has led a life full of different steps. In 2019 she found herself forced to keep things simple. She reduced down to ONE material, repeated. Simple household materials – the stuff of kitchen cupboards, stored for parties, kept in reserve, and she exploded outward, crafting form, value and surface from something that should be finished, disposable, cheap, and kept at the back of a kitchen drawer. And in creating meaning from this void she is also solving the question we have all asked at some point on a residency – how do I make something impressive when I’m here with a small suitcase and a great desire just to do nothing and stare at the river. Then you start, and the next thing you know, Ilona is weaving massive, glorious sheets of armour from the mundane. If you check her website, they don’t seem to stop.
Then you shine a light, as happened when her work was used as part of a sound performance in the Alter Schlachthof, Wels, 2021 and the things go even more haywire, the objects turn into metal, plastic, shimmering fish. All of the individual steps of Ilona’s journey come together to form these forms. Image, textile, 3d stage set.
You can see a more contained version of the same process here – the Japanese wave of Hokkusai. And here, other mundane, disposable objects are woven into fabrics, their materiality brought into question with these new arrangements.
Ilona Tömő is an artist who feels the currents and ryhthms of today and wants to process them into a form that shouldn’t be, but can. And when you learn that she is the mother of twins, this battle to create and to care for the contents of the kitchen is illuminated in a starker stage light. We can read what we want into these currents on the walls. Currents that we all feel, tugging at us from our personal and shared histories as we trudge every night to the industrial supermarket chain around the corner.
Georg Wilbertz:
Dr. phil. MA, Architektur- und Kunsthistoriker, Studium in Köln und Wien. Aktuell freiberuflich tätig als Kurator, Autor und Fachjournalist für verschiedene Medien.
Arbeitsschwerpunkte sind die epochenübergreifende Architektur- und Stadtbaugeschichte mit Fokus auf die österreichische Moderne und die Tendenzen der Gegenwart.
Seit über zehn Jahren als Schlagwerker aktiv im Kollektiv Musik im Raum (MIR), Linz. Ab 2015 im Vorstand von MIR tätig. Entwicklung und Durchführung von Konzertprogrammen im Bereich der improvisierten und neuen Musik mit wechselnden Ensembles. Ausloten der interdisziplinären und gattungsübergreifenden Potentiale durch die Zusammenarbeit mit Literat*innen, Künstler*innen und Schauspieler*innen. Im Zentrum steht dabei das Zusammenspiel von Sprache, Klang und Musik.
EXIT: Richard III._remix
Georg Wilbertz is the only musician this time. Gamely jumping into the visual game with a cluster of objects, material rich: iron, glass, bronze, red paint, a white plastic tarpaulin. Neatly folded by the most knightly of men in the room at the time, Rainer Neübauer. But it’s all just a stage. A fold out stage, ready for a cut up, abridged one man version of Richard III for drum kit, percussion, accordion, electric guitar and one actor. The iron should be like the spine, like the literature that often forms the backbone of Georg’s improvisations. It’s also like a suit of armour, but flattened out and yeah, rusty. Like the macho, masculine, manlinesses that he sees rising up everywhere, the Trotteln, trying to throttle the world.
On Sunday night I was lucky enough to see a rare first version (he normally only does one) of the work which Georg will present at the Finnissage on 11er April um 1900 Uhr.
The spine this time is Richard III, a play I kind of knew existed but have never had anything to do with. We all know the quote of course, “A horse a horse…” and for me watching Georg Wilbertz’s Richard III remix provided a healing relief to know that Shakespeare had knowledge of such dickheads 500 years ago, and that they will come to a sticky end. As someone who loves music and is interested in the potential of improvisation, I can say that I found Georg’s ensemble performance (including accordion, electric guitar, a drum kit and percussion) to be fluid and evocative, with moments that made the spine tingle and the cyborg hair on the back of my plastic neck stand on end, via the words, the doings and the music. I would highly recommend coming. It’s a bloody magical wish dream.
Last but not least comes Wolfgang Tragseiler, who unfortunately, but somehow fittingly, cannot be here tonight. I understand he is having a very difficult time at the moment.
geboren 1983 in Tirol
2003 – 2008 „Bildhauerei_transmedialer raum” Kunstuniversität Linz
2008 – 2009 „video & photografie” Yildiz Teknik Üniversitesi Istanbul, Türkei
2009 – 2011 „Experimentelle Gestaltung“ Kunstuniversität Linz
Before us stands “Ohne Reserve Rad” Docht, Wachs, Allo. gemacht mit der Schöller, a Vögl, in Innsbruch – Ohne Reserve geht um Männlichkeit, and is about the scientific knowledge that the Y chromosome men are made from is far less impressive and complex than the double X chromosomes that women wear. In connection with thinking about a giant blond idiot desperately calling for his horse, perhaps it helps to know that they will fall, and perhaps it helps to explain that “die männer haben keine Reserverrad”. The candle burns at both ends. Wolfgang asked that I light the candle of his. As I do, notice that the light from Karin Maria Pfeiefer’s installation burns on, and the electric motors of Maria Grun’s autonoma continue to turn, and see how the light dances on the plates of Ilona Tomo’s armour and I ask that we stand together, women and men, old and young, we Sensitive, Caring Filter Systems, and that we be each other’s armour, as the times become harder and weirder than any we have known.
www.sambunn.net 