Eiko Gröschl: Paintings again, wieder Bilder

Charim presents Paintings again, wieder Bilder, a solo exhibition of new work by Vienna-based artist Eiko Gröschl, produced over the past three years. Working in oil across varying scales, Gröschl draws on fragments of everyday experience: natural settings, architectural elements, and anonymous figures in streets and parks, rendered in ways that oscillate between observation and recollection. Recurring motifs such as trees, fishing scenes, and weights from the artist’s daily workouts form a loose, subjective vocabulary grounded in habitual gestures, while everyday objects and architectural elements take on an elusive, almost iconographic presence.

Both familiar and uncanny, these images seem to hover at a distance, as if veiled by a thin, dreamlike membrane. Gröschl’s painting process embraces contingency and accident as generative methods. He often paints over canvases previously placed on the studio floor, incorporating residual drips, traces, and sediment from earlier works. Images emerge as much through subtraction and erosion as through controlled mark-making, with the artist’s technique shifting between dense impasto and thin, fluid applications of paint. At times, pigment is deliberately dissolved or lifted with turpentine, producing blurred, unstable surfaces that evoke the fugitive quality of memory.

The resulting images – intensely atmospheric and psychologically charged – capture peculiar moments of suspended time. Resisting fixed interpretation, they open onto a space for feeling and introspection. At once concealed and revealed, they are shaped by shifting light and lived moments.

In 2025, Gröschl was artist-in-residence at Charim Factory, where he developed large-scale paintings over six months, several of which are presented in Paintings again, wieder Bilder.

Eiko Gröschl (*1992, Graz, Austria) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna in the class of Erwin Bohatsch. He lives and works in Vienna. His first monograph is forthcoming.