David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce an online solo presentation of new paintings and drawings by Tobias Pils at the Frieze New York 2021 Edition of Frieze Viewing Room, a virtual fair that will run May 5 – 14 alongside Frieze New York at The Shed.
In conjunction with Frieze Viewing Room, Pils and artist Michael Williams will discuss The Islands, Pils's new body of paintings on view in the presentation, on Thursday, May 6 at 11 AM PT / 2 PM ET / 8 PM CET. To attend the virtual talk (which will feature live closed captioning), please register here.
The Islands are the result of significant changes in Pils's working methods and constitute the beginning of a major new addition to his material and visual vocabularies. Like all of his work to date, these paintings have been rendered in black, white, and shades of grey. But while Pils has previously painted on the floor—leaving the fronts of his surfaces unprimed—here, he has painted vertically on primed and stretched canvas supported by a large easel. The images themselves are developed first in preparatory sketches, so that their allegorical landscapes, fantastical beings, and indelible earthly and cosmological motifs emerge on the canvas with startling clarity. The paintings comprising The Islands are filled with scenes of creatures, humanoid and otherwise, that occupy their own delimited terrains—unique islands of vision and circumstance on which particular laws of nature and states of mind reign supreme.
In 2020, a large-scale installation of paintings by Tobias Pils (b. 1971, Linz, Austria) was inaugurated at Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany, and a major fresco was installed at the Renzo Piano-designed campus of École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop, Germany (2017); Le Consortium, Dijon, France (with Michael Williams, 2017); Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas (2016); and Secession, Vienna (2013), among other institutions. Recent group shows include Picasso et la bande dessinée, Musée Picasso, Paris (2020); Jay DeFeo – The Ripple Effect, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2018); and Spiegelnde Fenster, 21er Haus, Vienna (2017). His work is part of the permanent collections of the Albertina Museum, Vienna; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; and Le Consortium, Dijon, France, among other institutions. Pils lives and works in Vienna.