MGK Museum für Gegenwartskunst

Philipp Timischl

MGKWalls

05 May 2023 - 10 Nov 2024

Philipp Timischl, The Embedded Mentality of Self-Sufficiency, 2021, Still, Courtesy the artist and Layr, Wien
Philipp Timischl, The Embedded Mentality of Self-Sufficiency, 2021, video still, Courtesy the artist and Layr, Wien, MGKSiegen, MGKWalls, Photo: Philipp Ottendörfer
Philipp Timischl (*1989 in Graz, Austria, lives and works in Paris, France) is developing the new work “I like my brain and thinking and always having thoughts” for the fourth edition of “MGKWalls”. The site-specific exhibition series places two prominent walls of the museum at the centre of an annual presentation: the entrance wall in the museum foyer and the large LED wall on the façade, which opens the museum’s architecture to the city in a programmatic way and has been a distinctive landmark since the museum’s opening.

Timischl’s multimedia installations combine painting, sculpture, video and text. His works are characterised by the interplay of images he finds and those he makes himself, as well as documentation and fiction, the personal and the public. They also examine the everyday, the self, the body and gender, social milieus, and the art viewer. Across media, the artist opens different narrative levels and interim spaces. The new work for MGKSiegen creates an interface between interior and exterior space, media and spatial experience. It consists of a large-format wall drawing using airbrush technique and specifically produced videos from waiting loops and popular video material from the internet: e.g., a muscleman resembling a Buddha meets a cute little Chihuahua dog. Both walls create a moment of deceleration, of waiting but also of comic surprise. Timischl raises questions about experiencing art/images and the viewer’s associated expectations.

Curator: Thomas Thiel