Bar du Bois

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

⦚   Water Lilies, 2020
    Bar du Bois
    wallpaper, recurring pattern of painted objects, edited digitally

The title of Bar du Bois’ (engl. wood bar) wallpaper, Water Lilies, evokes the beginnings of modernism and the first decades of the 20th century. Leaving Impressionism behind, Claude Monet (1840–1926) moved away from landscape painting via the motif of water lilies anchored in water and found an early form of abstraction by abandoning the horizon. Viewed from above and without clear reference points, a horizontal surface became an indeterminate space in the vertical.

Like their famous artist colleague from Giverny, the Viennese art collective Bar du Bois, founded in 2013, also uses this effect and the oscillation of a liquid surface as an iridescent and diffuse basis. Their ‘blossoms’ come from the world of contemporary goods: rolls of adhesive tape, hotel suitcase trolleys, pacifiers, tobacco products of various kinds, pill boxes, a Diddl Mouse drawing from the 1990s, and other artifacts of everyday culture cavort on the dark green shimmering background. For the wallpaper commissioned by the evn collection, various motifs were treated in a painterly manner and digitally placed in the ‘pond’, a nature morte of modern bohemians. In a clever, repetitive wallpaper pattern, a theoretically infinite water surface and the objects floating on it emerge like a visual mantra.

Bar du Bois’ approach is playful and focused on results. With the eponymous (wandering) bar as a concept, the collective sets out with a changing line-up (here: Andreas Harrer, Julian Turner, Florian Pfaffenberger, and Camilla Bischoff), engaging with exhibition business and art events in a refreshingly meaningless way. Attention to detail and resourceful realizations are celebrated with relish and exposed as affected in equal measure. Aware of the quality criteria and material fetish of the Wiener Werkstätte, all variants of design at Bar du Bois are comparatively unpretentious, albeit thoughtful and imaginative. The concept of formal diversity combined with the joy of creation emerge as common strengths. Collaboration as artistic strategy, the work on the network, and the collective process are just as important as their outcome.

Heike Maier-Rieper, 2021 (translation: Virginia Dellenbaugh)

Blue Spatial Segments, 1960
Frank Gribling

Sarah Ortmeyer

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

⦚   PALMA (TAPISSERIE), 2019
    Sarah Ortmeyer
    wallpaper, digitally printed

Tolia Astakhishvili

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

⦚   Spaces about other Spaces, 2025
    Tolia Astakhishvili
    wallpaper, digitally printed

A few images can be discerned on a wallpaper. They are reproductions of paintings by her grandfather, surrounded by a repeated lily motif on a blue background. In this setting, the paintings appear like quotations, highlighted by illusionistic frames and at the same time flattened, merged with the background—both present and distant.

Tolia Astakhishvili grew up in her grandfather’s studio, in a house in Tbilisi, Georgia. The roughly 250 m² house was a network of living and working spaces in which life and art blended seamlessly. The house was created with three artists and the wallpaper with golden lilies decorated one of the workrooms. In the 1930s, he was a well-known artist who, despite the isolation of the Soviet art scene and political restrictions, succeeded in developing an independent artistic voice. Astakhishvili’s revival of his work is therefore not only an act of private remembrance but also a contribution to the art history of modernism.

Astakhishvili recounts how, as a seven-year-old girl, she painted together with her grandfather or leafed through his books when he was absent. Each room had its own color. The dining room was a rich green, the showroom was a salon‑like space with blue wallpaper patterned with lilies and lit by a single window. In contrast, the studio was a true working studio—crowded with paintings, materials, and tools, its walls a muted grey. In these distinct atmospheres, early impressions took shape—impressions that would later return as motifs and formative ideas in her work.

In this stillness and atmosphere, early experiences took shape—experiences that later return as motifs and formative ideas in her work.

The lily wallpaper becomes an occasion for remembrance, a kind of afterlife of the images, like the formation of light as a contrasting medium of what once was. Added to this is the repetition of the motif, which resembles an updating, a revival of what is threatened by forgetting. Astakhishvili describes: “I only have one photograph of the wallpaper, and yet the idea of revisiting it has accompanied me for many years. In my memory, it is never static. It always appears at the edge, in peripheral vision, a constant background that is constantly changing.” Memory does not preserve images; it animates them, continually re-actualizes them, shifting scale, perspective, and effect. Even present-day seeing is overlaid by this afterlife of images, permeated by the resonance of earlier impressions.

For this reason, Astakhishvili, who practices an art of forbearance, does not remain bound to the surface in her work. In fact, she has become known for precise spatial installations and in situ works. In them, spaces do not open up but rather become nested, sightlines blocked and views obstructed. In this way, it becomes perceptible how memory eludes completeness but simultaneously calls for completion—always filtered, enriched by perception, later experience, and interpretive consciousness. This is only consistent, for memory is psychological. It is not only image but also spatial relation, state of mind, smell, aura, and atmosphere. And although it also becomes spatial, what it conveys is only an apparent coherence. For inner images may seem expansive, like dreams, yet they remain fractured, shaped by repetitions, fanning out into fragments and the need to recall them again.

Thomas D. Trummer, 2026 (translation machine edited)

Herzl (III), 2016
Yael Bartana
Fine Art Print

Für die mehrteilige Serie Herzl beschäftigt sich Yael Bartana mit Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), Autor, Journalist, Politiker und Jurist. Herzl, der in Pest (heute Budapest) geboren wird, gilt als eine der prägendsten politischen Figuren des 19. Jahrhunderts. Er war Korrespondent für die Neue Freie Presse in Paris, lebte lange Zeit in Wien und verbrachte seine Urlaube im Salzkammergut. 1904 starb er in Edlach an der Rax. Seine politische Vision und seine Tatkraft galten der zionistischen Bewegung und der Gründung des Staates Israel.

Die Künstlerin Yael Bartana stellt durch die Beschäftigung mit der historischen Figur Fragen nach Identität, Macht, aber auch der nach kultureller Erinnerung. Ihre Fotografien setzen sich aus archetypischen, auch klischee- und rollenhaften Elementen zusammen und beschäftigen sich mit der Auflösung politischer Mythen. So zeigt sich die Künstlerin selbst in staatsmännischer Pose in einem klassischen Portraitformat.

Bartanas Arbeiten bewegen sich dabei zwischen Realität und Fiktion, zwischen persönlicher Aneignung und gesellschaftlicher Kritik. In der Realität war Herzl selbst nie ein Staatmann, kein offizieller Vertreter einer Regierung. Die Betrachter*innen werden eingeladen, die Grenzen von Geschichte und Gegenwart neu zu denken. „Meine Rolle als Künstlerin ist es, die Imagination zu öffnen, um Geschichte und Zukunft zu überdenken.“

TAPETI

Bar du Bois

⦚   Water Lilies, 2020
    Bar du Bois
    wallpaper, recurring pattern of painted objects, edited digitally

Heike Maier-Rieper, 2021 (translation: Virginia Dellenbaugh)

Blue Spatial Segments, 1960
Frank Gribling

Sarah Ortmeyer

⦚   PALMA (TAPISSERIE), 2019
    Sarah Ortmeyer
    wallpaper, digitally printed

Tolia Astakhishvili

⦚   Spaces about other Spaces, 2025
    Tolia Astakhishvili
    wallpaper, digitally printed

Thomas D. Trummer, 2026 (translation machine edited)

Herzl (III), 2016
Yael Bartana
Fine Art Print

Der Standard – In Utopien kann man das Scheitern vorhersehen, 05.12.2012

TAPETI

Bar du Bois

⦚ Water Lilies, 2020 Bar du Bois wallpaper, recurring pattern of painted objects, edited digitally

Heike Maier-Rieper, 2021 (translation: Virginia Dellenbaugh)

Blue Spatial Segments, 1960Frank Gribling

Sarah Ortmeyer

⦚ PALMA (TAPISSERIE), 2019 Sarah Ortmeyer wallpaper, digitally printed

Tolia Astakhishvili

⦚ Spaces about other Spaces, 2025 Tolia Astakhishvili wallpaper, digitally printed

Thomas D. Trummer, 2026 (translation machine edited)

Herzl (III), 2016Yael BartanaFine Art Print

Der Standard – In Utopien kann man das Scheitern vorhersehen, 05.12.2012

⦚ Water Lilies, 2020
Bar du Bois
wallpaper, recurring pattern of painted objects, edited digitally

Blue Spatial Segments, 1960
Frank Gribling

⦚ PALMA (TAPISSERIE), 2019
Sarah Ortmeyer
wallpaper, digitally printed

⦚ Spaces about other Spaces, 2025
Tolia Astakhishvili
wallpaper, digitally printed

Herzl (III), 2016
Yael Bartana
Fine Art Print