Come as You Are. Kunsthalle Wien Prize 2023

About

Come as You Are - this exhibition title is both an invitation and an instruction, a possibility and a restriction, a promise and a challenge. The collaborative exhibition with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the University of Applied Arts Vienna sees itself as an institutional amplifier of the artists and their various concerns, which they express through their work. The title of the exhibition also refers to the polyphony of artistic perspectives and forms. Artists and the public are invited to reflect together on the ambivalence of our present, for example between the chronic urgency and simultaneously longed-for deceleration - or as Nirvana sang back in 1991: "Take your time, hurry up".

The exhibition with works by the winners of the Kunsthalle Wien 2023 Prize shows works by the artists Jusun Lee and Marielena Stark - the main prizewinners - as well as Željka Aleksić, Mila Balzhieva, Luisa Berghammer, Daniel Fonatti, Valentin Hämmerle, Michael Reindel, Anne Schmidt and Marc Truckenbrodt.

The ten artists are in a phase of transition, between art university and independent work within the professional art field. In many of the exhibited positions, a high degree of reflection on one's own identity as an artist in a turbulent present and under the precarious working conditions that are generally associated with the decision to be a professional artist can be recognised. This brings the theme of ambivalence to the fore once again, between desire and realisation, between a consciously chosen lack of alternatives and pragmatism in the face of existential necessities.

Curators: Astrid Peterle
Assistant Curator: Hannah Marynissen

The Kunsthalle Wien Prize 2023 is realized with the kind and generous support of Steirer Mika & Comp..