OPENING RECEPTION
Thursday, 7th September 2023, 17:00-20:00
Magdalenenstrasse 10/GL2, 1060, Vienna

COMMUNE is a new contemporary art gallery opening on the 7th of September 2023. Founded by partners Abby Mckenzie from Scotland, UK and Daniel Lippitsch from Carinthia, Austria, who have previously worked in various aspects of the artistic ecosystem including galleries, curation and writing in London, Hong Kong and Vienna.

The inaugural exhibition ‘Breaking Flesh’ features work from an array of international contemporary artists both emerging and established, including: Anna Anvidalfarei (Italy), Tolia Astakhishvili (Georgia), Alexander Basil (Russia/Germany), Tracey Emin (UK), Vivian Greven (Germany), Anat Homm (Germany), Lukas Leichtle (Germany), Alejandra Moros (USA).

The antithetical nature of the exhibition title, both in the combination of wording and the inherent contradictions within our unconscious understanding of the traits of these two words, attempts to begin the disintegration of our perceived notions of the interplay between bodies and the nuances of human connection both internal and external. First to explore the idea of flesh. An immediately physical concept, but not exclusively human nor living. Flesh can connote the bestial, the rotting corpse, the maimed and the erotic. Yet always perpetually mortal and unceasingly temporal. To break suggests to shatter, snap, sever. Flesh on the other hand, as distinct from the skeleton, can be torn, burned, shredded, punctured but by its very physicality the means of violation are tangibly and sonically distinct. Just as the connections and meanings of these words at first seem overt, whilst then collapsing and reconfiguring, so do the works of the artists in the exhibition elude the confines of the immediately observable. The figurative collapses into the abstract, the absurd as opposed to the psychoanalytical and at times the gentle in contrast to the violent.