Tobias Pils: Between Us Space

Opening on Saturday, April 2, 11 am – 8 pm

Galerie Eva Presenhuber is delighted to present Between Us Space, the gallery’s sixth solo exhibition with the Austrian artist Tobias Pils and the inaugural exhibition at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Vienna. Between Us Space features an intervention by fellow Austrian artist Gerwald Rockenschaub.

Tobias Pils paints pictures that might best be described as sleepwalking dances. A sole palette of black, white, and grays evokes dreamlike scenes from which ghostly figures occasionally materialize. In his new work, these are most often horses, but there is also a solitary rider, a pregnant woman, and a series of old men wearing strange masks. None of these seem to be really present, however: they appear as if on the threshold between here and now, between history and memory, between anticipation and oblivion. Though they almost physically extrude from the paintings, they are intangible, impossible to capture or classify in anything like stories. There are no over-arching narratives; each element stands for itself. Their visual entanglements result in something more akin to hidden-object puzzles: boisterous, sometimes overlapping elements that remain in mysterious suspense.

Between Us Space is the name of Pils’ new exhibition at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Vienna, and it is true that we cannot help but feel a certain distance to these paintings: the hollow horses appear mystically animated and, against a bare background, the gaunt rider appears like a distant trick of the light. Pils never allows us to fully enter his realm of staged moments; his characters tend to keep to themselves rather than interact with the viewer. At the same time, this distance does enable a clearer perspective: instead of diving in and getting lost inside these paintings, we become aware of just what it is we are seeing and how we react. Seeing, contemplating, watching; the gaze certainly plays an important role for Pils: eyeballs appear again and again, perched atop bodies like oversized heads. They twist and turn towards other figures in the picture, but never outward, never at those looking at them.