Louise Giovanelli: A Song of Ascents / Evelyn Plaschg: Viscous City

HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark is proud to present two solo exhibitions by outstanding young painters whose practices exemplify the vitality and complexity of contemporary painting. With A Song of Ascents by British artist Louise Giovanelli and Viscous City by Austrian artist Evelyn Plaschg, the program brings together two distinct yet resonant approaches that explore the body, image, and surface within a cultural landscape shaped by digitality, ritual, and urbanity.

Both artists engage with figuration as a threshold space—between presence and absence, clarity and ambiguity—developing powerful visual languages that combine technical precision with emotional intensity. While Giovanelli’s works often suggest sacred or theatrical states of heightened awareness, Plaschg’s paintings reflect a fragmented subjectivity embedded in contemporary urban environments. Their shared interest in gesture, atmosphere, and embodiment invites viewers to navigate painted spaces where personal experience and collective perception intertwine.

Louise Giovanelli: A Song of Ascents
Cooperation: The Hepworth Wakefield (Yorkshire), Museum Villa Stuck (Munich)

Louise Giovanelli paints striking hypnotic works that emit light both on a visual and metaphorical level. Her works often show mysterious objects, such as a closed curtain, a glimmering shock of hair, or the reflecting surface of a cocktail glass. There are also human figures, often women, seemingly caught in moments between awe and desperation, or about to cross over a border of experience and knowledge. Their motives are held deliberately unclear, and are presented together with the analogue blurring of a memory or a half-forgotten dream. She creates her resplendent works using the classical techniques of painting, applying thin layers of highly pigmented oil paint and thereby achieving very varied and almost sculptural results. Giovanelli’s paintings invite us to cross a threshold where reality and fantasy meet, in a space laden with ambiguity and in which each scene oscillates between the outstanding and the uncanny. Her haptic paintings all share a sense of spirituality, something evidently transcendent that indicates another realm. But Giovanelli also addresses secular themes, such as the search for identity against the background of economic, structural, and social upheaval, and ecstasy and pleasure. She addresses the search for meaning and orientation–or rather their lack of orientation, as well as the testing out and crossing of borders, and also the endless energy that this phase of life brings to bear.

Curators: Marie-Charlotte Carrier and Sandro Droschl.

Evelyn Plaschg: Viscous City
Styrian artist Evelyn Plaschg is considered an outstanding painter of her young generation. Her work is now to be acknowledged in a solo exhibition at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark. The artist combines sophisticated technique and her own idiosyncratic imagery to produce a kind of painting that is figurative in ways that transcend all standard approaches. Plaschg uses the medium of painting with great state-of-the-art prowess, in order to explore convincing forms, expressions, and perspectives that while working within the well-known tension between the figurative and the abstract also open up intimate realms shaped by digital worlds. This has much to do with the approach to life taken by the artist’s own generation, which has practiced and internalized showing, enacting, and optimizing the body like no generation before. These works tell of the artist’s own physical desire in connection with the other, and of collective experience in shared spaces and social systems in which these merge. The exhibition title Viscous City evokes an urban scenario and stands for Evelyn Plaschg’s interest in architecture, transportation, and infrastructure. She is at the same time concerned with the place of the subject, in locations where people live close together and encounter each other. Like facades that stand out from or meld in with each other as we pass by, these works together form a painted topography that beholders wander around.

Curator: Jan Tappe.

Accompanying both exhibitions, two publications will be released: A Song of Ascents and Viscous City, featuring newly commissioned texts that provide in-depth perspectives on the artists’ practices. In addition, a dynamic public program will run throughout the exhibition period, including talks, lectures, and special presentations that invite further engagement with the themes of the shows.

Press inquiries: Helga Droschl / T 0316 740084. Press download.