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.