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What You Need to Know: Premiering in Zurich this week at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, “Tobias Pils: Happy Days” marks the seventh solo show the artist has had with the gallery and presents a new body of work that highlights his signature style. On view June 7–July 20, 2024, the exhibition is comprised of two large-scale triptychs, a suite of eight paintings, and a bronze sculpture. Speaking to themes of community and togetherness, as well as isolation and emotional turmoil, the works on view highlight Pils’s singular method and creative vision, and positions painting as a site of transformation and where concepts of time are made malleable.

About the Artist: Austrian artist Tobias Pils (b. 1971) is best known for his Expressionist paintings executed in a black, white, and grayscale color palette that feature both elements of representation and total abstraction. Creating intricate plans for each work, these preparations are nearly completely lost in the process of creating the painting, emphasizing a moment of translation—both literally and metaphorically. A major permanent installation of the artist’s work was installed at the Kunstmuseum Bonn in 2020, as well as a large-scale fresco at the campus of École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay, France, in a building designed by Renzo Piano. Earlier this year, Pils’s work was included in “The Echo of Picasso” at the Picasso Museum in Málaga, Spain, and last year he was the subject of a significant exhibition at Bibliotheca / Collection Reiner Speck, Cologne, “Tobias Pils / On Kawara: The Passage of Time.”

Why We Like It: Melding elements of abstraction and figuration, Pils’s paintings elude easy reading, and recall hazy memories or a story partially forgotten. Across the exhibition, various paintings tap different emotions viscerally; in works like the 2023 version of Us, a child, woman, and elder can be discerned, but the swathes of black pigment and inconsistent rendering of human figures lends to an air of the anxious uncanny. In one of the 2024 iterations of Us, anonymous figures at various orientations to a staircase suggest simultaneously an evolution of one individual, or a collective, tapping into ideas of connectedness and community. It is in Pils’s monumental triptychs, however, that the artist’s ability to play with narrative, and weave his compositions in and out of the scope of storytelling’s boundaries that his skill with intuitive making is most highlighted. Considered both individually as well as a whole, the works conjure myriad interpretations, and suggest an element of world building that draws the viewer ever inward.

See featured works below.

“Tobias Pils: Happy Days” is on view at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, June 7–July 20, 2023.