Tobias Pils - by Richard Shiff & Tobias Pils (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Zeichnungen/Drawings is the first book dedicated exclusively to the painter Tobias Pils's (b. Linz, 1971; lives and works in Vienna) drawings. His graphical forms-- the lines, figurations, even the intervening spaces-- constantly change the direction in which they set out. Their ambivalence destabilizes any attempt at interpretation. One would think that the indeterminacy of Pils's visual idiom must torment him, yet in fact this state of existential tension fills him with absurd pleasure. Rather than conceiving his works with a clear objective in mind, he allows himself to fall into them. He-- his art-- remains open to everything that happens in the creative process. Taken together, Pils's drawings operate along the diffuse boundary between order and disorder, as though, acknowledging the disordered present (the life we lead), they came from an ordered past (the life we have constructed for ourselves).

About the Author

RICHARD SHIFF (*1943) studied at Harvard, where he completed his doctorate with a thesis on Impressionism. His analyses of works by Cé zanne, based on the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, are particularly well known. He is Professor of Art History at the University of Texas. Tobias Pils was born in Linz, Austria, in 1971 and lives in Vienna. His paintings, predominantly in shades of gray, move between figuration and abstraction. Current solo exhibition: "Happy Days", Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, until July 20.