Acrylic on canvas
100.2 x 100.2 x 4.2 cm


Zobernig’s practice is arguably best considered as one that “view[s] the great modernist project as in a perpetually unfinished state” (David Pestorius in his essay Due Process, 2006). For why else would an artist since 2000 produce grid paintings, often in a diamond format, if not to bring to bear the ghosts of Piet Mondrian and Blinky Palermo?

But unlike Modernism’s adversity to discourse, Zobernig’s process embraces, in an almost theosophical sense, the spiritual use of the straight line, playfully building on historical moments and revealing an intuitive approach that upon first glance may appear at odds with the coolly grid-like system. Zobernig’s process is a completely subjective one in which the artist is opening up and questioning our historical legacy and its conflicts, such as the real vs. the symbolic or the secular vs. the spiritual.


*1958 in Mauthen, Austria | Living and working in Vienna, Austria