Lombardi—Kargl is pleased to present a special project at Paris Internationale that brings together works by Erwin Thorn (1930-Vienna-2012) and David Fesl (*1995, Prague).
Conceived as a dialogue between the artists, this intergenerational compilation explores conceptual and material boundaries.

Thorn and Fesl developed ideas that rethink space, power structures and deal with the encounter between time and space. For both, the process is as important as the artwork itself, an interesting endeavor in the engagement with scale and size, periphery and center.

Above all, this presentation is an opportunity to test a model of coexistence, that brings art, alive in the continuous present. The seemingly unrelated artworks can develop unexpected poetic and new associations. Connected through textual and graphic qualities, they share a sort of possible combinatorics and were selected so that they do not limit each other; the emphasis is on suggesting a dialogue between them rather than on conveying visual similarity.

Geometric shapes and organic forms coexist in the conceptual works of Erwin Thorn, where they articulate the visual as a system of coordinates that redefines space and our conceptions of it. Thorn radically rethinks the canvas as a medium of artistic expression in an intuitive and deliberated mode. His works from the late 1950s to the early 1970s restructure the perception of matter, space, and light. In line with the maxims of the ZERO movement, the artist pursued the formal reduction and non-expression.
More akin to reliefs than paintings, these works engage in a play of light and shadow, that depart from the conventional pictorial space to embrace biomorphic architecture. For Thorn, the color white signified not the end but the beginning of a concise exploration that transcended the materiality of the image and deconstructed the myths of traditional painting. He loosened the frame holding the canvas, altering its tension and allowing the materiality of the painting to radiate sculpturally into space. In doing so, he also exposed the conditions under which art is created and received.

Erwin Thorn was born in Vienna in 1930 and survived the Nazi era in Palestine. In the early 1950s he returned to Vienna, where he studied at the University of Applied Arts. During the 1960s and 1970s he had solo presentations at the most important institutions in Austria and participated in international exhibitions with the protagonists of the ZERO movement. With his reductive imagery, the deconstruction of the traditional medium and his biomorphic expansion into space, he clearly positioned himself in the European post-war avant-garde.

Erwin Thorn (1930-Vienna-2012)

Recent and current exhibitions:
Pop Art, The Bright Side of Life, Albertinaklosterneuburg, Klosterneuburg (2024); Erwin Thron, approaching space - androgynous, approaching space-meta-a-morphosis, Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna (2024); Blind Date, Museum Liaunig, Neuhaus/Suha (2024); From Fibre to Form, Kunsthaus Dahlem, Berlin (2024); Picture this! The Belvedere Collection from Cranach to EXPORT, Belvedere, Vienna, (2023); Avant-Garde and the Contemporary, Belvedere21, Vienna (2021); THE BEGINNING - Art in Austria 1945 to 1980, Albertina Modern, Vienna (2020); Alfred Schmeller. Das Museum als Unruheherd, mumok, Vienna (2019).

His works are included in numerous private and institutional collections such as Albertina, Vienna; Belvedere, Vienna; Colección Ella Fontanals Cisneros, Miami; Neue Galerie Graz, Graz; Collection die Angewandte, Vienna; mumok, Vienna; Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York; Artothek des Bundes, Vienna; Wien Museum, Vienna; Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck; Fundación Allegro, Salamanca.

The inner logic of color, form, and texture characterizes David Fesl‘s small-scale, carefully assembled compositions. Seamlessly combined, natural and artificial structures assume an almost organic inevitability. The distinct sensuousness of his juxtapositions has an affective quality, thanks to the sustained confrontation of radically different materials synthesized into something irrevocably other. The objects bear traces of his everyday life and turn the things he carefully selects into abstract biographical fragments. His precise assemblages may be small, but in their balanced composition and their play with our perception of scale and relation, they certainly offer a more monumental evocation in their specific universal forms.

In these sophisticated configurations, each individual piece undergoes a metamorphosis in which shape, color, texture stands out. In the fragile, almost ephemeral works, the associations triggered by the individual objects and their narrative potential, which are precisely interwoven, trace a constellation of experience and sensory excitement.

David Fesl frees what he seeks and finds from their preconceived limitations, transforming them into an enigmatic form. In this amalgamation, something fascinatingly new emerges, which in its poetic as well as subtly identity-political visual language situates itself outside conventional categorization. The decidedly white surrounding space that provides the framework adds an institutional-critical component to this language that underscores Fesl‘s extraordinary positioning in the field of sculpture and incisive social analysis.

selected exhibitions:
You You, curated by Kate Sutton, Lombardi—Kargl, Vienna (2024); I will watch with you (with Esther Kläs), Center for Contemporary Arts Prague, Prague (2024); Hello Yuko, Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo (2023); The Clumsy Imitator of Artificial Life, Fait Gallery, Brno (2023); I Had a Dog and a Cat, curated by Hana Ostan Ožbolt, Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna (2022); Do Animals Go to Heaven?, organized by Collezione Agovino, Chiesa del Purgatorio, Matera (2022); David Fesl, ADZ, Lisbon (2022); David Fesl, Sperling, Munich (2022); David Fesl, Also on View, T293, Rome (2021); David Fesl, Lulu, Mexico City (2021); The Concrete Boy, Georg Kargl BOX, Vienna (2020); Against Nature, National Gallery Prague (2016–2017).

In 2024, David Fesl was commissioned to create the artistic concept for the Kontakt - Erste Foundation‘s twentieth anniversary celebration in the Secession, Vienna. He is the head of the sculpture studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.