Tobias Pils: Shh

Born in 1971 in Linz, Austria, 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.

Pils‘s deliberate use of painterly means creates distance. His preference for grayscale, which has recently been expanded by select colors, as well as for enigmatic constellations of what often remains a hint of architecture, a figure, or an object remove his paintings from reality and render them dreamlike. His pictures invite us to search for clues, to engage with their inherent logic and the grammar of the painterly language. Analogous to the process of painting governed by intentions and chance events, the viewing of the images also proves to be a processual event with an open outcome.

Recapitulating the painterly process is not limited to a single work. Pils’s paintings are created in groups that the artist calls “families.” Their coherence presents itself in the way certain compositional elements reappear throughout—comparable to a musical theme whose variation creates different moods. The term “family” implies that the images are close to the artist, yet not limited to the personal. They illustrate universal experiences of intimacy and distance, opposition and fraternization—a cosmology of the creaturely.

The exhibition at mumok is the most comprehensive presentation of Pils’s oeuvre to date. Along with an overview of his painterly works of the last decade, it also highlights the artist’s extensive drawing practice. A site-specific wall painting, which references both the transitory and the spatial dimensions of Pils’s work, is also part of the show. 

Tobias Pils lives and works in Vienna, Austria. He has been the subject of exhibitions at Bibliotheca Reiner Speck, Oswald-Mathias Ungers Haus am Kämpchensweg, Cologne (2023), the Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop (2017), Kunsthalle Krems, Krems an der Donau (2017), Le Consortium Museum, Dijon (2017), the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas (2016), and the Secession, Vienna (2013). In 2020 Pils realized a permanent installation at Kunstmuseum Bonn as well as a fresco at the campus of the École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay, Paris. 

Curated by Manuela Ammer.

Exhibition publication
Tobias Pils. Shh. 336 pages, 24 x 30 cm, Hardcover with dust jacket, German / English, separate language editions. Texts by Manuela Ammer, Ann Cotton, Bice Curiger, Friederike Mayröcker, Sophia Rohwetter, Richard Shiff, and Ferdinand Schmatz. Publisher: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne ISBN 978-3-7533-0930-9 (German) / ISBN 978-3-7533-0931-6 (English). Price: 48 Euros.

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