Open Studio Days 2026

Marco-Augusto Basso (Genoa, 1995) is an independent artist and curator. Interested in processes of audience engagement, he approaches artistic production through strategies that focus on context and the framing of the artwork, proposing alternative ways of seeking out and recognising poetic languages. Working primarily through project-based practices, he is also active as a curator and serves on the boards of several artist-run spaces in Genoa, including Palazzo Bronzo, which he co-founded, and Amanda artist-run space.

He is currently curating I am Voice, a performance series at Palazzo Ducale di Genova and CARTOLINE, a collective exhibition in Centro Pecci, Prato. His work has been presented at institutions such as Centro Pecci, DOCK20, Palazzo Ducale di Genova, Pinksummer, Platea Palazzo Galeano, NEST, Spazio Punch, and TORRSO. His performance projects have been presented, among others, at Cinema Galleggiante in Venice, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and Piedicavallo Festival.

Born in 1948 in Hard on Lake Constance, Vorarlberg. 1969–75: Studied sculpture & 1976–80: Studied metal design at the University of Applied Arts 1977–78: Rome Fellowship 1980–86: University assistant at the Vienna University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture Since 1987: freelance sculptor: constructive – concrete – conceptual

I explore the manifestations of color. In the broadest sense, I realize a form of "painting" that is both conceptual and intuitive. This places me at the boundary of contemporary art production: each work is unique and complete, yet it is also part of an ultimately endless sequence of actions and decisions that leads to diverse visual events, some of which even surprise me.

Liddy Scheffknecht’s work encompasses a broad spectrum of media, yet forms a coherent, ongoing artistic program. In photographic sequences, installations, sculptures, drawings, and media hybrids, the artist explores the relationship between temporality, perception, and space; in doing so, she creates and ruptures illusions in equal measure.

Lola Pfeifer (*1999, Vienna) holds an MA in TransArts from the University of Applied Arts Vienna (2024, graduated with distinction), studied printmaking at Tama Art University Tokyo, and art history at the University of Vienna. Her work has been shown internationally, including in Vienna, Paris, New York, Hamburg, and Athens. Working across installation, sculpture, and text, the artist is drawn to questions of repetition, erroneousness, and what things leave behind when removed from their context. Materiality is never neutral: a cable bridge, a backpack, a ceramic shard — each carries layered narratives that is interrogated, displaced, and sometimes deliberately rendered illegible.

Julie Beugin is a Canadian artist who lives and works in Berlin. She will be the artist in residence at the Bildraum Studio in Vienna from July 27th to December 18th, 2026. With her paintings and photographic collages, she questions how abstraction can be in conversation with the everyday and ordinary. During her residency, Beugin will work from her close up photographs of Vienna's Gemeindebau architecture that is the center of Vienna’s housing history of affordability and community. She will work with ideas of walking and belonging in the city, in a tension between abstraction and recognizable place that invites an experience of discovery and exploration.

Since 2009, the former premises of the Rost company in Vienna’s 15th district have housed more than 15 different studios with around 30 people working across art, architecture, and design, with a particular focus on visual arts. Here is a current selection of artists from Pelzgasse 20: Martin Bischof: www.martinbischof.blog/about Sophie Dvorák: www.sophiedvorak.net Madita Kloss: www.maditakloss.com Lazar Lyutakov: www.lazarlyutakov.com Florian Nitsch: www.florian-nitsch.com Leo Peschta: www.leo.ok.ag George Rei: www.cutandscrape.com Patrick Scherer: www.patrickromanscherer.com We warmly invite everyone to visit, meet the artists, and explore their work and studios.

For the Open Studio Days, we will present videos in the courtyard featuring different artistic positions from the house.

Blanca Amorós (b. 1990, Elche) is an artist based in Vienna who studied in Valencia and Munich. Her paintings are based on found photographs, home goods catalogs, and encyclopedias, and explore the ideologies embedded in our visual culture. She assembles and alters this material until the familiar begins to shift. The result is both recognizable and slightly displaced. At the center of her work is the historical construction of gender roles, particularly the association of femininity with caregiving and domesticity, which generates a latent unease.

In her work, she explores humanity’s potential for destruction through mass production – and the resulting mass waste – and its repercussions on the human body; exploitative power structures; migration; and the realities of life as a woman. She primarily uses discarded materials and works across the fields of object art, installation, animation and performance.

Using everyday packaging film, leftover items, string, wire and more, you can create your own little object. Bring along your own “rubbish” and design your own personal “daily plastic”. 7 and 8 November, from 1 pm to 3 pm.

Yein Lee (b. 1988, KR) is a South Korean artist living and working in Vienna. Trained in Traditional Asian Painting at Hongik University and Object-Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, she works across sculpture, installation, and performance. Her practice follows an iterative logic of becoming, where form, body, and space remain in flux. Fragile, rough, and porous, her works resist fixed meaning and unfold as precarious, living structures. Lee has shown internationally, including at the 15th Gwangju Biennale, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Kunstverein Göttingen, and Kunstraum Niederösterreich.

Gerhard Himmer's paintings represent a process-oriented and self-referential approach to panel painting, where the autonomous expressiveness of color as a material and the tactile qualities of the picture surface are central themes. In a kind of medial self-representation, his abstract compositions, devoid of any gestural brushstroke, generate themselves from the fundamental properties and reactions of color, its relationship to gravity, and the nature of the support. I am currently preparing my exhibition at Künstlerhaus Factory, for which I am producing new large-format works. https://www.les-nouveaux-riches.com/interview-with-gerhard-himmer

As part of Open Studio Day, Paul Plut will give a musical performance or short concert in my studio in the early evening. Afterwards, I will play a selection of music that I listen to while working. About Paul Plut: https://paulplut.com/anfang

In her meticulously handcrafted prints, Anja Ronacher subjects each negative to the same process in the darkroom, the use of light, chemicals, cut outs and stencils results in an image, that allows the thing to emerge from deep blackness, where its precise form can only be intuited. The images collude with and reveal a greater darkness that surrounds and, ultimately, is within and behind human consciousness. Contrary to a linear conception of time, they draw a complex narrative of past, present and future. They are mediators between spiritual and material worlds.

In the little book "Die Aufgaben des Geistes" (the task of the mind) Georges Bataille is asked whether art is a suitable means for expressing and thus overcoming fear. We would like to add another question to this: Is art a suitable means for expressing and thus overcoming death? In an inverse manner, humanity has gone from immortality to mortality. With the creation of tools and things our animal immanence has given way to a consciousness of our historicity, our existence in past, present and future. If future is merely a human category, will it loose it s relevance while we are waiting? (Anja Ronacher, 2014)

Evelyn Loschy, born 1980 in Graz, studied Transmedia Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Audio-visual Art in Amsterdam and Multimedia-based Sculpture at the UDK Berlin. Loschy works with different media, reaching from video, photography, site-specific interventions to kinetic sculptures. Besides various exhibitions within Austria (Kunsthaus Graz, Vienna Contemporary) as well as abroad (Biennale Krasnoyarsk, MOCAK Krakau, Art Rotterdam), she was awarded with the Arts Promotion Award of the City of Graz. Since 2019 Loschy is working in the federal sculpture studios in Vienna.

Marlene Heidinger (1996, Vienna) is a painter, curator, and filmmaker who lives and works in Vienna. She studied painting and animation at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and at the ÉCV in Paris. In 2024, she completed her Master of Curatorial Studies. In her thesis, “When Artists Curate: From Studio to Exhibition Space,” she examined the studio as an exhibition format and developed her interest in curating as an artistic practice. Her engagement with textile art and craft, particularly embroidery as a feminist practice, is combined with a critical analysis of social and political structures.

As part of the Open Studio Days, I invite visitors to an open cross-stitch circle in my studio. Together, we will continue working on one of my pieces, using cross-stitch as a collective practice. Rather than a quiet, often isolating domestic activity, embroidery becomes a connecting element that fosters exchange and encounter. Visitors are welcome to actively participate or observe the process. The shared working process opens up new perspectives on art production as a performative act and stages the studio as an exhibition space.

De Melo was born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and lives and works in Vienna. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and works in the fields of painting, drawing, and sculpture. Most recently, he was featured in the group exhibition “Du sollst dir ein Bild machen” at the Künstlerhaus Wien, curated by Günther Oberhollenzer.

Hope is a possibility of survival and helps to overcome feelings of fear. The drawings "Rosevendors with Tattoos" depict various emotional states. They are executed in graphite on paper.

Darja Shatalova is a multidisciplinary artist with a focus on the structuralisation and systematisation of data, describing current events of the environment and the personal microcosm. In a continuous recording process, she creates multi-layered, coded forms of expression that are composed of symbols, mathematical signs, colour codes and assignments, serving analysis and pattern recognition. The data, collected in the form of graphic notes in artist's books, is translated into site-specific installations, long-term performances and sound compositions, whereby the transformative process forms a central element of the creative practice.

My work is interdisciplinary, eco-emancipated and posthumanist. I explore our multispecies entanglements by collaborating with living organisms (algae, fungi, bacteria), to co-create stories — Sci-Fi or speculative fabulation — imagining alternative worlds nurturing the vitality of human and other-than-human life. My exhibitions embody care and connection, and showcase biological processes, often inviting audiences to interact or "become with”. In my studio-lab visitors can meet my microbial projectpartners. I am currently working on a new concept around the “Anthropocenic Wound” exploring transcorporeality; the deep connection of our planet’s skin and our bodies.

For the open studios, I invite audiences into my process for “Anthropocenic Wound,” exploring transcorporeality—the deep connection between the planet’s skin and our bodies. I visualize bodies as archives of environmental histories, materially and chemically continuous with Earth and marked by anthropogenic traces, and work with materials as co-thinkers, evidence, and part of planetary metabolism: sediments from industrial/mining sites (NL, AT), coal (fossilized plant matter), hair (an archive of chemical encounters), and skin imprints. I also use anthotype, a non-toxic light-sensitive photographic process using plant extracts. I can imagine to share this technique in workshops during VAW.

Ramiro Wong is a research-based, transdisciplinary artist whose work combines painting, sculpture, film, installation, performance, and new media. His artistic practice began in the natural sciences and engineering, leading him through film and moving images to fine art and philosophy. Currently, his research focuses on the possibilities of the senses of smell and taste in contemporary art. His upcoming projects include a land art intervention in a former mining area in Peru (planned for 2027) and an exhibition on the theme of smell (planned for 2028). He lives and works in Vienna, Austria.

For the Vienna Art Week, I have planned a studio tour and a dinner—performance for the visitors.

In Peter Kozek and Thomas Hörl’s shared studio, different working methods and media come together: film, video, performance, objects, costumes and installation works. This glimpse into the studio reveals both collaborative projects and individual works. Amidst finished pieces, materials, costumes and objects, it offers a direct insight into the artistic processes and the long-standing collaboration between the two artists.

Märzendorfer studied at the Academy of Fine Arts from 1994 to 2001 and graduated in sculpture under Bruno Gironcoli. In the 1990s, she began working with casts made from frozen water/ice, a material that has accompanied her to this day. It lends the sculpture a performative character and expands it to include the dimension of time. The disappearance of the object brings the process as the only constant function of existence into the focus of perception and emphasizes the importance of space and memory. In her work with other materials, Märzendorfer repeatedly refers to this processuality by placing the process of creation at the center of attention.

Visitors experience an everyday studio setting: works currently in production, stored pieces, and works waiting to be moved to a new location.

How do materials, surfaces, or spaces behave before, during, and after being translated into the photographic? What is the photographic supposed to be, and where does it begin and end? These questions form the foundation of my artistic practice. To explore them, I draw on various media—from classical photographs to leaded glass windows to carpets. Yet in creating images, I still operate within the framework of photographic principles, using photographic processes and associations. The goal is to probe the very concept of photography.

Elena Kristofor is a visual artist born and raised in Ukraine and now living in Vienna, who works with photography, installations, and site-specific interventions. Her work deals with human inscriptions in the landscape and addresses themes of foreignness, threat, displacement, and identity. Kristofor studied art and photography at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and architecture at the Vienna University of Technology. She combines photography, drawing, and sculptural elements to articulate deeply personal reflections on perception and space.

Finding depth in simplicity, immersing myself playfully and without overthinking in the material manifestations of meaning—that, in a nutshell, is my exploration of sculpture and space.

Selected works, workshop, music, fire, something to drink, something to talk about.

Born in London, lives & works in Vienna. Brishty Alam’s works are invested with a magical, shape-shifting quality. They adapt to, resist and converse with their environments, and when brought together, they unfold their many aspects in gregarious and often surprising ways. She works with slippages between models such as chemical structure and natural history specimens, and what we might call social, cultural, political or economic processes. Themes such as migration and value systems (material, aesthetic) permeate her work, which finds expression in sculpture, video and drawing. Alam’s works are part of the Austrian Federal Arthotek and the Wien Museum and is represented by EXILE gallery.

Open studio: Yein Lee & Brishty Alam

Conceptual-Analytical Painting Conceptual works, installations, and pictorial and object-based works At the center of the work is the relationship between image and space, or space and image—the image as a three-dimensional spatial phenomenon, and space as a potentially dynamic medium for images Starting from pure materiality—strokes of paint (up to 6 meters in length) that are dated, measured, weighed, and archived—this initially functionless material is gradually placed within an open context of artwork, image, or object.

Installation / walk-in color space—see Image 4 or similar

We are an artist duo and combine object, painting, fashion and textiles in an interdisciplinary way since 2007. Our current series of works, STUDS, blurs the lines between painting and sculpture. We dispense with canvases and use wooden frames as sculptural skeletons. Painted in vibrant neon colors, they are mechanically braced with faux leather, straps, eyelets, and rivets. This tactile materiality evokes BDSM and fetish aesthetics. The abstract, constricted objects resemble body parts and playfully explore identity, desire, and queer, feminist discourses.

Katharina Höglinger, *AT, lives and works in Vienna. She is a visual artist and serves as a university lecturer in the field of painting. Her work is driven by an irresistible impulse to (re)gain positions of social agency. By feeding her personal everyday experiences and observations into the machinery of her seemingly carefree appropriation of artistic styles and techniques, KH reoccupies the material and immaterial spaces that constitute our social reality. The result is works of unmistakable lightness and humor that also tell stories of existential seriousness.

In my artistic work, I am interested in sociological and socio-political issues. My works explore a very personal engagement with the tension between the individual and society. My perspective on this society is always, in part, a reflection on myself. Nevertheless, it is not a dance around my own ego, but, in the spirit of Hilde Domin, an invitation to exchange ideas about observations that concern our society and, therefore, always concern us as well. In doing so, I work with photography, text, video, performative elements, objects and drawing, which combine to form open spaces for association.

Extra Event: 8 November 2026, 4 pm: 'In Resonanz': Angelina Ertel (flute, free improvisation) responds to current works by Maria Hanl

Arnold Reinthaler, *1971, Austria, studied sculpture (with Bruno Gironcoli) at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and wrote his PhD in cultural theory with Thomas Macho (on the circulation of ›nomadic‹ as a notion in the art context). Reinthaler’s work addresses systems for measuring time while focussing on the subjective activities of long-lasting work processes that he translates primarily into stone, paper and the media of light. He models the notion of 'temporality' by engraving fleeting letters onto an almost anachronistic medium like granite, or by continually testing models of 'timing' with techniques of self-recapitulation. Arnold Reinthaler lives and works in Vienna.

A lecture performance with literary and art scholar Hanna Hamel. The reading will be from the book *Tomorrow at This Time: Stage Directions for 365 Days*, in which Arnold Reinthaler meticulously documented the daily routines of “K.”

Anna Vasof is an artist whose work explores the boundaries between film, video, sculpture, and performance. Her practice often combines humor and critical inquiry, using everyday materials and situations to question how stories shape both personal and collective experience.

I want to show the audience the place where an underdog trains.

My name is Hossein Maher, a graduate of Painting from the Faculty of Decorative Arts in Tehran. I am recognized as a contemporary painter in Iran and have exhibited widely both nationally and internationally, including at Frieze New York this May. My recent body of work, developed over the past decade, exists beyond geography and reflects my view of the contemporary human condition. The human figure appears without gender, identity, or memory—a presence increasingly diminished in agency and self-determination when faced with the complexities of modern life.

Natalia Gurova's multidisciplinary practice encompasses sculpture, printmaking, drawing, poetry, site-specific installation, and curating. She is interested in how things are connected and disconnected, what are the structures behind them, how they are present, how they form and collapse, what is the role of facts and narration. She was born in Belarus, raised in Russia, since 2014 lives and works in Austria. Natalia studied site-specific art 2014-2018 at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, object sculpture 2018-2025 at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She got Würdigungspreis for her diploma project at the Academy of Fine Arts, Miriam Cahn Stipendium.

During the Open Studio Days, my studio will transform into a temporary installation and meeting space. Sculptural elements, fragments, texts, and materials from ongoing projects will form an environment that reflects on instability, negotiation, and forms of coexistence in times shaped by uncertainty and permanent crisis. Visitors are invited not only to view the works, but also to spend time in the space, drink tea, talk, rest, and enter conversations about artistic production, political anxieties, and everyday forms of navigating fear and exhaustion. The studio becomes a place for encounters, informal exchange, and collective reflection through objects, materials, and presence.

Reissner’s painting practice is rooted in an interest in the image as an object and its expansion into space. He expands on the concept of deconstruction by cutting out shapes from cotton or plywood and moving away from the traditional format of the panel painting. In this way, the surrounding architecture and environment become part of ever-changing compositions, and viewers are transformed into protagonists within a painterly setting. In his more recent works, recognizable objects increasingly appear alongside abstract elements, evoking an ecological network and reminding us of the interconnectedness of things.

Abdel Azim Mohamed’s large-format ballpoint pen drawings weave sociocultural themes, pop culture, and motifs from art history into a surreal psychogram through their dense visual language. The artist graduated from the University of Applied Arts with a degree in Graphic Arts & Drawing and works with paper, textile media, and ceramics. Ramsey is a painter and aquatic ecologist. He uses the genre of world landscape painting to depict a wide range of personal and political themes. Alongside his artistic practice, he works on the DANSER Danube Sediment Restoration Project at BOKU University. This engagement with ecological processes serves as an inspiration for his artistic work.

An artist talk between the two artists is scheduled for November 8 at 4:30 p.m. The conversation will be moderated by Mag. Andreas Karner, visual artist and former lecturer at the University of Art and Design Linz.

Bernhard Buhmann (b. 1979, Bregenz, Austria) is an Austrian painter based in Vienna. His practice combines painting with social inquiry, drawing on studies in sociology, communication, and fine art. Working between figuration and abstraction, he explores themes of identity, perception, and the influence of digital technologies on contemporary life. Through precise geometric forms, vibrant color gradients, and expressive painterly gestures, Buhmann creates a dialogue between traditional painting and digital visual culture.

Laia Fabre, * in Barcelona (ES), is a multidisciplinary artist based in Vienna. She studied at BAU Art & Design University in Barcelona and earned an MA with Dorit Margreiter at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Fabre works with performance, video, film, choreography and painting. Her practice is spontaneous and energetic, exposing social habits and stereotypes. Using irony, boldness, and humor, she turns the everyday into a stage. In her work, the message takes precedence over technique—aiming to reveal contradictions and provoke reflection.

During Open Studio Days, visitors are invited to meet me – Laia Fabre – in my studio and explore my text-based paintings as well as a large-scale color work currently in progress. A selection of my video and film works may be shown, accompanied by conversations about my many performance and food-related projects. I share the studio with Kamen Stoyanov, offering the opportunity to encounter two distinct artistic practices.

Thomas Steineder studied a.o. photography time-based media and transmedia art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Steineder’s works explore the space between lived experience and photographic representation, where active encounter replaces the role of documentation. His practice of “tactile photography” transforms the act of taking photographs into a spatial-performative event. Numerous exhibitions and residencies, most recently in Trondheim, Norway. His works are held in collections including the museum of vienna, the state collection Niederösterreich, and the federal state art collection. In 2025, he received the federal state scholarship for artistic photography.

Marie-France Goerens works at the intersection of sculpture, drawing, and spatial intervention. Her practice explores movement, rhythm, density, and the relationship between body, material, and space. Emerging from gestural and linear processes, her abstract forms move between fragility and architectural presence. Drawings, models, and sculptures exist in close dialogue and reveal the development of sculptural thinking and spatial action. The artist lives and works in Vienna.

As part of the Open Studio Days, Marie-France Goerens opens her studio to provide insight into her current artistic practice and working process. Sculptures, drawings, models, and material studies will be presented, revealing different stages of development and experimentation. The studio is conceived less as a conventional exhibition and more as an active working environment in which form, movement, and materiality become visible. Visitors are invited to engage in conversation with the artist.

Kerstin Bennier (*1976, Salzburg) lives and works in Vienna. Her practice operates at the intersection of object, sculpture and installation. Counting functions as an intuitive artistic strategy and a tool for perception and structure. Through serial and repetitive processes, Bennier creates complex systems from handcrafted elements in which time becomes visible as both a physical and visual dimension. Her works explore the possibilities and limits of what can be counted, approaching the immeasurable through repetition, order and accumulation.

Bartosz Dolhun primarily works in the fields of object-making and sculpture, while also developing two-dimensional works, functional furniture pieces, and interventions into everyday life, drawing from a background in graphic art and drawing. Wood is usually the central material — often found or discarded — whose individual qualities significantly shape the working process. Recurring thematic motifs run through various bodies of work. Many of the works, often developed over extended periods of time, have not yet been publicly exhibited.

I am a visual artist from Bangladesh, currently based in Vienna. My work includes drawing, painting, collage, and sculpture, where I combine vibrant colours, fragmented forms, and unexpected elements. I am interested in human behaviour, communication, and the way identity changes through cultural experiences and everyday life. Through intuitive and sometimes absurd narratives, I try to create a space between clarity and mystery, where forms can move freely beyond fixed meanings. I studied fine arts in Bangladesh, Poland, and Austria, and my work has been exhibited internationally.

During the Open Studio Days, I will open my studio to present recent works in drawing, painting, collage, and sculpture. Visitors are invited to experience my working process, materials, and ongoing research around identity, cultural transformation, and human communication. The studio will become a space for conversation and exchange, where fragments, colours, and forms come together through intuitive and experimental narratives. Guests will have the opportunity to engage directly with the artworks and learn more about the ideas behind my practice.

Kamen Stoyanov’s artistic practice finds parallel between physical movement and process, and ideas of historical, social and cultural change. The artist performs – in actions or objects – with the same care in streets, fields, and art spaces, drawing on the accidental and ubiquitous readymade. Inevitably, high and low culture mix in Stoyanov forms; his work is just as likely to consist of making his native Bulgarian yoghurt as neon sculpture. From here, he inserts himself into dialogues of power, progress, and geopolitics, without abandoning the intimate that surrounds his ideas. – Pierre d’Alancaisez

Stories from Dimitrovgrad", 14 min., 2026 digitized 16 mm black-and-white film (silent) "Stories from Dimitrovgrad" is a three-part film project made with local, non‑professional filmmakers in Dimitrovgrad, Bulgaria, based on the archive of Kinoklub 57; it arose through research, participatory workshops, and collaborative writing and shooting. The format — a silent film on 16 mm black‑and‑white stock — draws on the origins of cinema to address recurring social problems in a reduced, timeless visual language. The return to analogue, silent cinema emphasizes continuities in human conflict and sharpens attention to gesture, rhythm, and collective memory.

Juliana Herrero is a Patagonian artist born in southern Argentina and based in Vienna. Her practice spans Patagonia, Buenos Aires, and Europe, connecting personal, geographic, and emotional histories in which displacement becomes multiple belonging. Working across analogue and digital media, she engages with ephemeral installations, sculptural works, painting, expanded media, moving image, sound, and performative actions, as atmospheric scores. Through her notion of Sur[real]isation, Herrero creates immersive and site-responsive environments where transformation, perception, and the shifting boundaries between nature and artifact, and between physical and virtual realities, are explored.

For the Open Studio Days, I propose a performative set in the form of chamber music, composed of three to four sculptural works that function as playable scores and sonic objects. The work combines pre-composed sonic fragments with live improvisation and engages the audience in participatory moments involving voice, states of resonance, and playful sonic translation, inspired by a ludic approach to the “telephone game.” The voice is understood as a primary instrument and relational tool, activating its potential for grounding, resonance, and collective regulation in times of multiple crises.

The drawings of Marianne Lang are representations of native fauna and flora. She shows the subtle beauty of species, which usually do not attract a lot of attention: eroded leaves, lichen species, the wood grain of felled tree trunks, overgrowth or moths. Lang is experimenting with exceptional techniques as burned engravings on paper, paper scratchings, paper with wooden tarsia or silverpoint on canvas. The used technique and the motif match impressively and the delicate details of the drawings show the highly accurate processes. Through the combination of rare motifs and secretive techniques the drawings appear realistic and abstract at the same time.

Movement is the starting point of my art. I am interested in the human body as a place where both internal and external forces become visible. Social dynamics are inscribed in it just as much as vulnerability and desire. It always begins with a line. Actually, a point—and from this point, an entire universe opens up for me. Drawing and painting are always intertwined. Since 2016, the Praterateliers have been my creative space. A gem that has evolved over time, secluded and seemingly frozen in time. This unique combination of seclusion, history, and spaciousness offers a freedom that is hard to find elsewhere.

As a painter and architect, Sophie Ramm explores how knowledge between the arts condenses and takes form through acts of translation. In her paintings of caryatids and atlantes, she examines how gestures are transformed across time within the tension between familiarity and estrangement. Painting is understood here as a site where discourse and sensuous appearance intersect. Sophie Ramm studied in the painting class of Karin Kneffel and Andrea Büttner at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich and completed her Diploma in February 2026. She studied architecture and art history and is currently pursuing a doctorate at TU Wien on the significance of the figural.

The Open Studio Day brings together painting, lyrical texts, and participatory elements into an open space of exchange. Images become sites of temporary inhabitation, inviting visitors to consciously take up positions rather than confronting them with fixed points of view. Alongside a reading of the accompanying texts, visitors are invited to articulate questions, thoughts, or associations in response to the works through postcards featuring the image motifs. The mailbox within the exhibition space opens up a shifted temporality in which gestures and thoughts are collectively carried forward, transformed, and newly addressed.

Julia Zastava is a visual artist working with drawing, sound, text, installation and performance. Her practice is based around: processes of transition, questions of narration, unknown mistakes, misplaced shadows and collapsing intentions. Her way of working consists in reflecting from multiple disciplines that she studied, such as ballet, directing and visual arts. Investigating the pleasure of the possibility of the impossible, she creates a fluid narrative space in which concepts merge, elude definition and evoke wonder as they exist in a liminal state between origin and interpretation. Her protagonists defy categorisation and do not fit into specific roles or identities.

For her artistic works, which in most cases stem from reflections on space and context, Lotte Lyon employs a variety of media. These include objects, drawings, photography, and wall drawings, and occasionally video and architectural art. She is interested in the body, space, and architecture, as well as in questioning classical sculptural parameters such as weight and durability. Among other things, she seeks ways to address the theme of changeability in her work. Her artworks can appear in various forms or variations; the use of color is a key aspect.

Anita Fricek (b. 1967, Vienna) studied art at Studio Hamilton in Florence, at the City University of New York, and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She was a visiting scholar at the University of Western Sydney, Australia, a recipient of the Austrian State Scholarship for Fine Arts, and has held artist-in-residence positions in London and Sydney. Over the past 25 years, she has exhibited in numerous national and international solo and group exhibitions. She is a painter and draughtsperson. The themes she has developed over the years range from educational models to care systems, sustainable food production, and economic aspects of artistic practice.

Theresa Ulrike Cellnigg (*1992 in Linz) paints on a large scale, using vivid colors and expressive brushwork. Central to her work is the expression of feelings and sensations that emerge as reactions to the outside world and are explored from a feminist perspective. Her figurative painting is composed of personal experiences, metaphors, art historical references, and observations of contemporary phenomena. Contrasts and oppositions run throughout her entire body of work and are visible in both composition and process. Cellnigg expresses the merging of her outer and inner worlds, thereby allowing others to take part in her thoughts and emotions.

The studio is home to the four artists Theresa Ulrike Cellnigg, Johannes Lakinger, Leo Lunger, and Georg Pinteritsch. All artists will be present and offer insights into their work. Refreshments and music will be provided to encourage a relaxed exchange between artists and visitors.

I am a Vienna-based Italian artist whose multidisciplinary practice moves fluidly between visual and performing arts, writing, and installation. Trained as both a professional ballet dancer and a contemporary visual artist, I work across mediums and contexts as a translator — observing, interpreting, and connecting fields. My works begin as performative actions and evolve into live performances, sculptural installations, and publications exploring the choreographic potential of words. My recent research examines how language shapes movement, from subtle everyday gestures to broader societal choreographies.

At the centre of Emma Peinhopf’s practice is the portrait. In her colored-pencil drawings, a space opens up around the figures; objects and items come together to form a setting. Alongside depictions of real people from her life, colorful faces and fictional characters with large eyes repeatedly appear in her drawings or as ceramic figures. In 2026, she opened Studio Date, an artist-run studio. She studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in the Drawing and Printmaking department.

My name is Veza Czyn, born 1991 in Bosnia-Herzegowina, living and working in Vienna, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. I work across different media: drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, text, audio. My artistic practice revolves around questions of everyday life, memories, politics, dreams, desires, relationships, doubt, failure, repetition. I am working my way through questions around the weird process of being in the studio doing this thing I’m doing: How to be an artist? What am I doing? What does the material do? My artistic work is a messy response or reflection of these questions. Serious play, peripheral thinking, pathetic, but unavoidable.

Born in 1996 in Vöcklabruck, Austria, the artist lives and works in Vienna. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna under Daniel Richter and graduated with distinction in 2023. Since 2025, he has worked as an independent visual artist. His paintings are defined by changing subjects rather than medium. Developed over months with great attention to detail, the works move between cinemas, folklore, social themes, violence, pastries, rainforests, and surreal imagined worlds. All connected through a consistent visual language.

There is gonna be coffee and cake.

Michael Heindl (born 1988 in Linz) studied painting at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and at the NCAD in Dublin. He lives and works in Vienna. In his work, he explores the contradictions and paradoxes of human behaviour in the face of a present that is experienced as crisis-ridden. A particular focus is on how we deal with the advancing climate catastrophe. Heindl has taken part in numerous international exhibitions and film festivals: Innsbruck Biennale 24, MSUB Belgrade, Elektrohalle Rhomberg, Picture Theory Gallery NYC, IFFR Rotterdam, Oberhausen Short Film Festival, VIENNALE, Hong Kong Arts Centre, Forum Stadtpark Graz, Kunsthalle Wien.

As part of the Open Studio Days, I am planning a daily film screening

The medium-specific characteristics of photography—and, above all, the associated questions of perception and viewing habits—are central themes in the artistic work of Peter Hoiss (*1977). Using viewing devices and periscopes, he directs our gaze toward optical illusions and explores the relationship between reality and representation. Our gaze is filtered and directed toward an ambivalent world that depicts nature and architecture but addresses their regulation. Since 2009, Hoiss has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Germany and abroad. His artistic practice encompasses photography, installation, video, and performance.

Helen Webers current artistic practice draws on rural life, “wild” nature, craft, and traditions. Using video, text, sculpture, (edible) objects and walks, she explores anti-modern longings, their historical continuities and „nature“ as a stage for ideology. After receiving the Theodor Körner Award 2025, she was awarded the Local Artist Award at Crossing Europe for the short Film Gay By Nature (together with Isa Schieche). Her work, often collaborative, has been exhibited at Diagonale Graz, Vienna Shorts, DOCK 20 Lustenau, Dokfest Kassel, Uferstudios Berlin, Publiek Park Brussels, and Collegium Artisticum Sarajevo, among others. She serves on the board of the Kunstverein anorak e.V. (Berlin)

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Xenia Lesniewski (born in Frankfurt am Main in 1985) lives and works as a multidisciplinary artist in Vienna. XL's practice encompasses painting, photography, installation, and performance. At the intersection of the personal and the political, she explores how social structures can be revealed and questioned in everyday objects, spaces, and rituals. Her works start from familiar environments, which she transforms into ambivalent scenarios between function and fiction, humor and criticism.

“The work of the Viennese artist Michael Endlicher is, perhaps more than almost any other, deeply connected with letters, language, and the sensitive exploration and analysis of contemporary linguistic and discursive practices. It intervenes in the linguistic distortions of the present, reflects on the dead ends into which we have maneuvered ourselves, exposes the lies and absurdities of ideologies, and—often through the means of the absurd—reveals their mystical core.” (Johannes Rauchenberger, Kultum Graz)

Michael Endlicher | Bruno Liberda Etching performance with live electronic music Endlicher “erases” signs in the new graphite-on-paper format; Liberda develops new compositions for the occasion from the series Quiet Thinking. In creative calm lies the power to transform threatening patterns of thought. Duration: approx. 30 minutes.

Luiza Furtado (she/her) born in Florianópolis, Brazil (1999). She received her Design BA from PUC Rio de Janeiro in 2021, and beggun her studies in the same year at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Furtado’s research on materiality focuses on synthetic surfaces as archives of memory. Studying the production chain of polymers allows her to delve into their prosthetic quality as fibers embedded into the human body. She is interested in multimedia work to collage with images coming from the genealogy of machines. Addressing the ecological impact of industrial design.

The artist invites us to join her studio space which will be enveloped in fabrics and transformed into an immersive installation for the Vienna Art Week 2026. A performance titled Fibers within (30 minutes long) which combines poetry and movement takes place in the event to welcome guests. And is followed up by a brief artist talk in relaxed format, where she will open the conversation to the group of visitors with tea and coffe.