Tobias Pils is among the most exciting painters making work today. Across two floors, mumok now presents the most comprehensive exhibition of this artist’s work to date, continuing the institution’s tradition of mid-career retrospectives of Austrian artists who have also achieved international acclaim.
With tremendous persistence and sensitivity, Pils has developed his own visual language, defying easy legibility and using ambivalence as a source of power. Deeply engaged with the history of painting, his work at the same time seeks actively to establish a dialogue with the present. In his minimal, often almost austere world of color, pictorial spaces unfurl that merge the personal with the universal and transform the intimate into the monumental. Repetitions, variations, and ruptures all generate a field of tension constantly realigning the gaze and enabling us to experience the act of seeing itself as a continual, open exploration—like a familiar place that we enter for the very first time.
The exhibition title takes this openness into account: Shh is not a word that denotes, but rather a sound that aims to achieve a particular effect. A sound that encourages being silent. It is a gesture that can variously seem calming or authoritarian, engender a sense of either intimacy or distance, open up or again shut off a space. Shh relates to communication, to the body, to emotions, and to atmosphere—all of which are dimensions that also play a role in Pils’s painting.
The exhibition at mumok focuses on Pils’s work from the last ten years and, as such, follows on from his last institutional show in Vienna (Secession, 2013). Over two floors, the exhibition reveals the ways in which Pils’s painting practice has evolved from abstraction to figuration and from black and white to color, but without the artist ever having attached any fundamental significance to these distinctions: “I’ve never seen my work as black and white, which is why I also don’t view it as particularly colorful now.”
Pils’s oeuvre is characterized by a recurring repertoire of motifs. Allusions to the artist’s own biography are combined with classical motifs from Western art history— the Holy Family, the Pietà, the figure of the Christlike savior. The two-dimensional look of cartoons serves as a template of sorts, as does the trenchant formal language of archaic imagery. In this regard, the formal aspects are Pils’s main concern: “When I’m painting, I don’t think in terms of subject matter, but purely in terms of the formal elements. I believe that the form determines the content.” For his paintings, this means that motifs mutate, disappear, and then rebuild themselves. The theme of genesis and death—the unending cycle of life—serves as a point of departure from which the artist may pose the central questions of painting anew. One painterly mark brings about the next, one painting engenders another, as if the painting process itself were also constantly enacting its own death and rebirth.
Notably, Pils’s background is in drawing. After studying graphic arts at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna), he worked primarily with pencil and ink on paper throughout the nineteen-nineties, before transitioning to the canvas in 2005. This enduring engagement with the practice of drawing, whose beginnings are indicated here by a collaborative work made with the writer Friederike Mayröcker, is one reason for the artist’s fondness for the black-and-white spectrum. Drawing has also shaped the production process behind many of his paintings. For years, Pils would paint with the canvas lying on the floor, and work on it from each of its four sides. It was not until 2020 that he began using primed canvases and an easel. His Geist paintings from 2024–2025 evidence Pils’s enduring proclivity for rotating his paintings while he works on them—as he would do when drawing on a piece of paper.
One of the major early works in this exhibition is Untitled (Mädchen) from 2015, also featured on the cover of the accompanying publication. A monumental rendering of a stick figure, somehow reminiscent of both a crucifixion and a traffic sign, this work was created following an extended stay in New York—a trip that would ultimately set the course for Pils’s confrontation with painting as surface. In the years that followed, he developed a repertoire of cartoon-like characters, which he refers to as Wiener Vögel or Knilche, and incorporates into his two-dimensional compositions. These oddball characters are assigned a gender—in some cases several—and ‘reproduce’; ultimately, this becomes an allegory for groups of paintings that share a ‘gene pool,’ so to speak.
It was in 2018 that Pils first used the term “families” in relation to his paintings, at which point genealogical considerations also gained importance in his work. This is particularly evident in the Seven Days cycle, in which a creation story serves as a metaphor for the creative process. Pils’s initial idea was to depict figures wielding Passstücke, ‘Adaptives’, by the Austrian artist Franz West. As a matter of fact, these figures look quite ‘adaptive’ in their own right. Their awkward bodies are flatly fitted into the space of the image, while they carry the actual Adaptives as baffles in front of their faces, as prosthetic noses, or as quasi-halos. In negotiating the origin of creation, Seven Days also addresses the genesis of Pils’s own painting. On both a large and small scale, Pils develops a cosmology of forms that seem to continuously spawn themselves.
This is vividly demonstrated by a group of tree paintings from 2019, which form a kind of artificial ‘forest’ when hung edge-to-edge in the exhibition space. In these paintings, Pils presents variations of the paradisiacal motif of an amorous couple making love beneath an apple tree. The props ‘tree,’ ‘lovers,’ and ‘apples’ are used to create six very different compositions in which form and content, the natural and the artificial, repeatedly change places. ‘Coupling’ and ‘reproduction’ are the objects of portrayal, while at the same time determining the composition of the paintings.
The unconventional way in which the tree paintings have been hung here demonstrates that Pils’s interest in the way forms fit together, in questions of rhythm and pace, is not limited to individual compositions. On the contrary, he tends to view his paintings as parts of a larger whole that also encompasses the broader spatial structure. This becomes apparent wherever the hanging deviates from classical methods of gallery presentation, and particularly in the wall painting, especially conceived for the mumok gallery space, where we see the figure from Untitled (Mädchen) reposing along the length of a twenty-meter wall.
When Pils shifted his painting practice from the floor to the easel in 2020, literally giving his process ‘new legs,’ his repertoire of motifs expanded. All of a sudden, horses began to appear, carrying other figures; eyeballs like heads emerged, surveying what was happening both inside and outside the canvas. In a figurative sense, the painting is now a body that is being carried. The eye, in turn—able to take some distance from the painting when at the easel—has become a mobile organ.
In 2022, Pils broke his right shoulder in a cycling accident. Once he was able to resume work again after a lengthy hiatus, he created a group of paintings titled Sh, which eschew the earlier cartoonishness entirely. The figures depicted here seem bony and fragmented, with limbs that are grotesquely contorted or have been replaced by prostheses. An impression of torturous treatment sets in, and, in almost every composition, a little old man appears, propped up by a walking stick.
The experience that is navigated in Sh—that of “being a body,” as Pils puts it— culminates in a family of artworks titled Us, in which the term ‘family’ is meant to be understood in its literal sense. The people depicted in the paintings in question are all close to the artist. He portrays them in shifting constellations of intimacy and distance, with his subjects repeatedly displaying the same poses and gestures—a woman kneeling to wash her long hair, and figures holding an egg aloft, are particularly striking in this regard. Together with the corporeal, color also finds its way into Pils’s oeuvre. A broken brown and blue impart atmosphere to the paintings, almost warming them from within. This is accompanied by a perceptibly heightened focus on the treatment of his surfaces, which the artist marks by smudging, etching, and stippling.
Pils’s most recent paintings offer a glimpse into the future: in a series of brightly colored still lifes, the artist explores elements of genre painting—and thereby the existential dimension inherent in the mundane. The tables in these paintings resemble stages; the vessels, candles, and flowers all become actors in genre pieces that probe the relationships between stillness and motion, surface and volume. “But virtually everything stands still,” wrote Friederike Mayröcker in 1993 in reference to one of Pils’s drawings—“who can understand that?”
The exhibition at mumok is the most comprehensive presentation of Pils’s work to date. In addition to an overview of his paintings from the past decade, it is also dedicated to the artist’s extensive oeuvre of drawings. The exhibition also includes a wall painting that was conceived for this specific location, underscoring both the transitory and the spatial dimensions of Pils’s artistic practice.
Curated by Manuela Ammer
Opening: September 26, 2025, 7 pm
For more information, click here.
