Artists:
Johanna Wakolbinger, Kater D., NIZEN, Rudolf Fitz
PUBLIC INTIMACIES
POP-UP EXHIBITION
28.-30.11.2025 I OPENING: 27.11.2025
Piaristengasse 6-8, 1080 Vienna
Where the private slips into the open and the public turns unexpectedly intimate.
„Public Intimacies” brings together four emerging artists from Vienna whose works transform everyday encounters, urban structures and personal impressions into compositions where proximity and distance, familiarity and estrangement, intertwine.
RUDOLF FITZ captures the quiet icons of Vienna’s cityscape: old shop signs, storefronts, sausage stands, gumball machines. Motifs that are easy to overlook become the understated protagonists of his paintings. The scenes feel familiar yet remain slightly out of reach. Rather than depicting places directly, Fitz draws from a kind of „painterly memory“ – recollections that take on a life of their own, places where wishful thinking and reality blur.
Nostalgia and irony don’t cancel each other out here – they share the same pictorial space. He paints not representations, but reveries: fictional spaces in which the local becomes something collectively felt.
KATER D. works with what others miss or discard: everyday fabrics, textiles, sketches, photographs, found objects – even (cat) hair. This ever-growing material archive forms the foundation of a practice where painting, object, and collage merge. In the series „Straßenperlen (Street Pearls)”, the gaze turns to urban everyday life: fleeting perceptions, incidental structures, the quiet aesthetics of the street.
In „Ziki in Rot”, a red-striped terry cloth becomes a ground for an oversized cicada, conjuring the stubborn buzz of summer; material and motif merge into a sensuous, haptic trace of a memory. The everyday sheds its function but retains its intimacy – becoming a carrier for a deeply personal way of seeing.
JOHANNA WAKOLBINGER translates emotions, memories, and moods into a visual vocabulary that moves between abstraction and suggestion. Acrylic, oil pastel, drawing – layer by layer, she builds vibrating surfaces where fleeting figures, objects, or fragments of text emerge.
Her paintings read like visual diaries – immediate, personal, intimate. Yarn forms made with a knitting spool integrate into the compositions as sculptural elements – delicate yet decisive. In „little bits”, Wakolbinger works with painted PVC sheets that are shrunk through heat and linked with fine chains: a constellation of fragments that come together into a sensitive whole while preserving a sense of fragility.
NIZEN employs a pared-back, urban aesthetic marked by clarity and reduction. In „Beach View”,
„Sea View” and „Lake View”, he explores the idea of the „view” – not only in the literal sense, but as a symbol of desire, ownership, and social distance. The titled views recall real estate listings where a glimpse of water becomes a promise of luxury. Yet NIZEN subtly undermines this aesthetic: he paints not with fine brushes but with brooms, sponges, and other cleaning tools – instruments of those who maintain the polished surfaces of these coveted spaces.
His work reflects not only on urban perception, but also on how intimacy and visibility are shaped within social environments. Curtains and drapes integrated into the paintings turn the gaze itself into a choreography of concealment and revelation, inside and outside.
Together, these works trace the porous boundaries between the personal and the collective, between intimacy and urban reality. „Public Intimacies” suggests that art itself emerges at precisely this threshold – where the most private finds resonance in public space.
All photos: © Teresa Wagenhofer