Tobias Pils is among the most exciting painters making work today. Across two floors, mumok now presents the most comprehensive exhibition of this artist’s work to date, continuing the institution’s tradition of mid-career retrospectives of Austrian artists who have also achieved international acclaim.

With tremendous persistence and sensitivity, Pils has developed his own visual language, defying easy legibility and using ambivalence as a source of power. Deeply engaged with the history of painting, his work at the same time seeks actively to establish a dialogue with the present. In his minimal, often almost austere world of color, pictorial spaces unfurl that merge the personal with the universal and transform the intimate into the monumental.

Repetitions, variations, and ruptures all generate a field of tension constantly realigning the gaze and enabling us to experience the act of seeing itself as a continual, open exploration—like a familiar place that we enter for the very first time.