The English idiom A delicate matter usually refers to a sensitive subject that requires careful handling. Read literally, the phrase also suggests something fragile, capable of being altered, easily damaged or transformed. This exhibition approaches human existence as delicate in both senses of the word. Our bodies are vulnerable to the material world, while our inner lives continue to be shaped by what we encounter within it. What we experience settles into memory, gradually influencing how we perceive the world and who we believe ourselves to be.

Bringing together sixteen positions from Daniel Richter's Kunst und bild | Expansion class at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, the exhibition marks the group's fourth consecutive presentation at Krinzinger Schottenfeld. Monumental canvases, intimate works on paper and a sculptural intervention unfold through shifting scales, materials, and gestures. Muted palettes and restrained tonal shifts create a visual language that unfolds gradually, where moments of tenderness coexist with tension and uncertainty.

Figures emerge only to dissolve again. Bodies appear fragmented, questioning ideas of wholeness, presence, and identity. Human and animal figures embody questions of desire, consumption, violence, and mortality, while mundane objects carry the emotional weight of memory, childhood, and everyday life. Elsewhere abstraction gives shape to inner states that resist language. Works engaging with femininity, queerness and the body unsettle inherited categories of identity through tenderness, irony, and quiet acts of resistance.

Across these different approaches, the images move between intimacy and distance, recognition, and estrangement, inviting multiple ways of seeing and understanding. They remain open, allowing contradiction, tenderness, and ambiguity to exist side by side. Their meanings unfold slowly, revealing themselves through atmosphere, gesture, and association rather than explanation. The exhibition opens a space in which complexity can remain visible without demanding resolution. Sensitivity is understood here not as weakness, but as the capacity to remain receptive to the world, to carry what it leaves within us, and to recognise human existence itself as something irreducibly delicate.

(Text by Yana Aleksejevna Brendel)