Paper has been a continuous complement to the vivid oil paintings which the pioneering Austrian artist Maria Lassnig is best known for, continuously accompanying her practice and taking on the vital role of providing an immediate and impulsive method of expressing her inner thoughts. The expression of subjective inner sensations of the body has been the center of Lassnig’s practice since the beginning of her career, coining the notion of Körpergefühlsmalerei, a now hugely influential concept which shaped the tradition of figuration through to our contemporary age.

Hadi Fallahpisheh takes photographic paper as his primary material, using a flashlight to draw directly onto the photo-sensitive paper, creating marks and gestures through the light exposure in the dark room. The constraints of darkness poses a limitation to physical perception, resulting in coincidental articulations that arise out of intuition. Fallahpisheh’s tongue in cheek characters depict comical yet domestic scenes, providing a multi-layered meditation on familial hierarchies, social relations and power structures

Marcel Odenbach, recipient of the 2021 Wolfgang Hahn Prize, is widely known as a pioneering video and multimedia artist. The work kurz und bündig reproduces the poem Holz und Späne by Ingeborg Bachmann, which Bertolt Brecht subsequently revised. Brecht evidentially held the poems of his contemporary in high esteem. Nevertheless - or perhaps because of this - he added his own annotations to some of them and modified them to make them even better in his sense. In this way, Bachmann's poem, "revised" by Bertolt Brecht, visualizes, by proxy, seemingly insignificant "corrections" that actually take on a different perspective. The work was part of the solo exhibition Beweis zu nichts at Kunsthalle Wien in 2017, the title of which also refers to a poem by Bachmann. 

Charline von Heyl moves seamlessly across paper and canvas, creating enigmatic visual experiences filled with surprising juxtapositions and interactions. Rejecting a cohesive style, von Heyl experiments with mediums such a lithography, silkscreen and other printing technique to continuously find new modes of expression. The artist currently has an extensive solo exhibition of new paintings at Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne. 

Across performance, sculpture and painting, Barbara Steppe’s works are meditations on time. Diaries are naturally important to an artist who chronicles temporality, depicting her own in the watercolors Tagebuch / Moleskine – self-portraits of sorts – visually condensing the events of a day into undisclosed entities.