Ashley Hans Scheirl: In & Out of Painting*

Born in Salzburg, Austria in 1956, Ashley Hans Scheirl has been systematically and radically transcending the boundaries of art, the body, and society for decades. A defining voice of the queer-feminist avant-garde and trans* art, Scheirl addresses pivotal questions about media, genre, and gender with a great degree of formal freedom, subtle humor, and a critical perspective. This involves interweaving a wide variety of artistic genres to create an oeuvre that celebrates identity as a negotiable, processual framework of relationships. At the same time, Scheirl is aware of their own entanglement in what is now a seemingly surreal neoliberal economic system. This solo exhibition at Belvedere 21 offers the first comprehensive overview of Ashley Hans Scheirl’s transdisciplinary work.

In & Out of Painting* is not a retrospective in the traditional sense, but rather a survey exhibition that showcases Scheirl’s artistic work from the late 1970s to the present day. As an immersive, quasi-theatrical presentation, a unique universe unfolds that lies somewhere between painting, film, installation, sound, and performance—a place of aesthetics, desire, and political imagination. The asterisk in the exhibition title alludes to the way it is commonly used in German to represent diversity and inclusion—and also refers to the performative and transgressive nature of painting.

The focus is on painting, which Scheirl deconstructs and charges with new meaning through intensive engagement with art history, pop culture, and feminist theory. Abstract Expressionism meets Photorealism, dark Romanticism meets Pop Art, Bad Painting meets Surrealism. Other important references include splatter films, Viennese Actionism, VALIE EXPORT, Donna Haraway, Maria Lassnig, and the literary pornography of Georges Bataille.

More than 120 works from five decades—including numerous paintings, videos, sculptures, and documentary material—are presented in a dense display that plays with colors, media, and architectural elements. Paintings appear on easels, partition walls, or as oversized blow-ups, while corporeal objects drip and protrude into the space. Visitors are invited to actively participate by walking around, interacting, and asking questions.

Recurring motifs such as bodily fluids, cyborgs, mutants, excrement, and capitalist symbols such as gold and diamonds permeate Scheirl’s oeuvre—always with subversive wit, sexually charged directness, and analytical incisiveness. Scenes from two feature films, Super 8 short films, diary entries, and sound installations expand the paintings into narrative, rhythmic, and poetic dimensions.

Instead of a linear chronology, a timeless pictorial space emerges in which the boundaries between work and environment, subject and object, beauty and abjection, politics and the personal are constantly shifting. Scheirl regards painting as a fluid platform that integrates, engulfs, and charges other media with new meaning. The artist thus creates a sensual, subversive exhibition space in which gender, desire, art, and society are renegotiated.

The exhibition will be accompanied by the publication Ashley Hans Scheirl: In & Out of Painting*, published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König.

Curated by Sergey Harutoonian. Assistant Curator: Andrea Kopranovic. Press contact: presse@belvedere.at / T +43 1 79 557 185. View press materials here.