Tobias Pils

'Tobias Pils. Shh', mumok, Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna

September 27, 2025 – April 12, 2026

Tobias Pils is among the most exciting painters working today. Employing a heavily reduced color palette, he creates paintings and drawings that weave abstract and representational elements into associative pictorial worlds. What in terms of subject matter can be interpreted as an investigation of both elementary and personal themes like birth and death or becoming and passing, also negotiates central questions in painting at large. For in Pils’ visual cosmos, one painterly mark leads to the next, one image to another, as if painting were constantly staging its own death and rebirth.

Curated by Manuela Ammer

Opening: September 26, 2025, 7 pm

For more information, click here.

Born 1971 in Linz, Austria

Lives and works in Vienna, Austria

Tobias Pils’ suggestive figurations are neither entirely legible nor altogether abstract, but rather create associative worlds of forms that appear as paradoxes that resist a straightforward reading. Out of a reduced palette of varied grey tones Pils creates paintings that vibrate with texture, filled with unexpected depths and infinite tones.

Following intuition and disregarding strict methodology, Pils intuitively pursues his ideas as they evolve during their making. He says of his process: “When I start to paint, I have quite a clear idea of the motive … the goal is to lose the idea through painting.” The viewer is confronted with unexpected iconography and motifs that then seemingly take several directions at once and create compositions of interpretive ambiguity that invite deeper contemplation. His body of work is diverse and complex, however an undefined narrative nevertheless runs through it, appearing as scenes of a cryptic dream. Pils will have a solo exhibition at Bibliotheca Reiner Speck, Oswald-Mathias Ungers Haus am Kämpchensweg, Cologne, DE in 2023. He has worked in large-scale installation, having painted a mural at the École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay in 2020. Pils has also presented his paintings in large, unfied works, at the Musée Picasso Paris in 2020, as well as at Basel Unlimited in 2016 and Secession, Vienna in 2013.

His work has been shown at various institutions worldwide, such as Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2022); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany (2021); mumok, Vienna (2021), Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2020); Musée Picasso Paris (2020); Kunstmuseum Bonn (2020); Josef Albers Museum Quadrat, Bottrop (2018); Le Consortium, Dijon (2018); Aspen Art Museum (2018); 21er Haus, Vienna (2017); Kunsthalle Krems (2017); Chinati Foundation / John Chamberlain Building, Marfa (2016); National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2010); among others.

Tobias Pils' works are held in various collections, such as ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna; Goetz Collection, Munich; Josef Albers Museum Quadrat, Bottrop; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Le Consortium Museum, Dijon; Lenbachhaus Munich; Lentos, Linz; Musée d‘Art Moderne, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum Stift Admont; Neue Galerie Am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz; Österreichischer Skulpturenpark, Unterpremstätten; Sammlung Reiner Speck, Cologne; The Warehouse, Rachofsky Collection, Dallas, and The George Economou Collection, Athens, among others.