LINZ.- Sophie Mercedes Köchert (*1988) is an Austrian photographer who, with her striking advertising subjects, has played a decisive role in shaping the visual identity of Bad Ischl Salzkammergut 2024, the European Capital of Culture. The artist, who specializes in analogue photography, graduated from the New School for Photography in Berlin in 2017 and has since explored a wide variety of fields of photography—from artistic projects to commercial commissions.

Observer of everyday life

Köchert proves herself to be a precise observer of everyday life. Her photographs make seemingly trivial things visible and, through dialogue, condense them into atmospheric narratives. Thus, individual moments become a story – about life in the Salzkammergut, about landscape, identity, and change. With great aesthetic sensitivity, a keen eye for detail, and a keen sense of the spaces in between, she succeeds in painting a multifaceted portrait of the region – beyond tourist clichés and idealized depictions.

The exhibition

At the Francisco Carolinum Linz, the focus is not on the commissioned work, but rather on Köchert's independent artistic visual language. The exhibition will feature previously unpublished works created during the Capital of Culture year, which she interweaves with a new photographic exploration of traces – one year after the major media event. The exhibition invites you to discover Köchert's work in all its depth: a dialogue between documentary precision and poetic condensation.

Curated by Maria Venzl

Peter Kogler » Alphabet City

Peter Kogler is a renowned Austrian media artist known for his immersive spatial installations. Since the 1980s, he has used digital technologies to transform spaces into visual labyrinths with graphic patterns. Typical motifs in his work include tubes, ants, and brains, which stretch across walls, ceilings, and floors, challenging the viewer's perception.

The artist's photographic archive serves as the starting point for the exhibition at the Francisco Carolinum Linz. In 1985, Kogler had an exhibition at the Gracie Mansion gallery in the East Village and spent a few months in New York—a time that significantly shaped his subsequent artistic development. With his camera, he documented the city's vibrant art and music scene at a time of profound social and technological upheaval.

The exhibition interweaves these early photographs with expansive wallpaper installations. The focus is on the original cardboard pieces from his New York exhibition. The exhibition is complemented by works created before 1985, as well as works developed afterward under the influence of his time in the USA. In this exciting overlay of archival material, patterns, and media reflection, Kogler's work can be experienced as a continuous dialogue between analog memory and digital construction.

On November 29, 2025, exactly 40 years after the opening of the exhibition in New York, the presentation of the catalogue and a concert will take place as part of the exhibition.

Claudia Hart » Patterns and Politics

Patterns and Politics is the first museum retrospective of the work of US media artist Claudia Hart. Since the mid-1990s, she has constructed complex scenarios in virtual 3D spaces in which mathematical structures, scientific models, and the visual rhetoric of consumer society are abstracted and merged. This creates dense, mythologically charged worlds in which virtual bodies, ornament, and algorithmic processes are inextricably intertwined. A simulated eye—the virtual camera—records these worlds; the resulting rendered sequences form the basis for Hart's films, installations, pigment prints, rapid-prototype sculptures, quilts, augmented reality wallpapers, and paintings. This creates a visual cosmos in which scientific forms of thought, historical narratives, and questions of perception, body, identity, attention, and power intertwine.

Again and again, she focuses on what is socially repressed – for example, when she pays tribute to forgotten female artists of the early 20th century in new “ghost paintings” or digitally disintegrates classic still lifes to reveal the fragile hierarchies of the art canon.

Her work deliberately engages with contemporary artists and activists; by integrating their contributions as data streams into her simulations, Hart demonstrates how strongly visual culture continues to be shaped by exclusion. Patterns and Politics thus condenses past, present, and possible future scenarios into a multi-layered visual space, inviting visitors to perceive the virtual space as sculpture and reinterpret ornamental structures as political texture.