COLOGNE.- Galerie Gisela Capitain announces its first exhibition with Austrian artist Tobias Pils.

Tobias Pils's pictures are paradoxes. Every artwork is at once process and product, gain and loss, imperviousness and transparency, plan and coincidence. We see lines, graphs, and various types of textures, combined with mechanical and organic forms. Figuration is suggested, however, a clear reading is hindered. What remain are set pieces and fragments that evoke arbitrary metaphorical connections. Just as interpretations go their own way - dependent upon the intuitive inspiration of the viewer – Tobias Pils’s painting process itself is also an exploration of the intuitive. Starting with one particular motif Pils is open for anything that might happen during the ensuing process, ideally creating images that are foreign even to him in the end. Pils forgoes chromatic colors, and heightens his concentration by working exclusively in gray tones. These form an entity within his oeuvre and generate unique and strange moods. Simultaneously, the reduced color palette refers to a conceptual approach similar to monochrome, or purely gestural painting.

"With Pils’s art, we are attending a filmic performance consisting entirely of segments of fade-out and fade-in, more blur than focus. The effect incapacitates our analytical powers while heightening and concentrating our emotional sensitivity." (Richard Shiff)

Tobias Pils was born in Linz, Austria in 1971. He lives and works in Vienna.