Isolde Tomann: Most Wanted

MOST WANTED
Jan M. and the Art of Being Someone Else

Isolde Tomann

A man vanishes. Left behind are billions, unanswered questions, traces leading to intelligence services, and a face that has travelled around the world.

The exhibition approaches the figure of Jan Marsalek not through the classic wanted poster, but through a play with identity, disguise and projection. Its starting point is one of the most spectacular corporate scandals in recent European history: the collapse of Wirecard and the disappearance of its former board member Jan Marsalek. Since then, the manager has become an almost fictional figure. He is wanted internationally, he is the subject of espionage investigations, and he is a projection screen for ever-new stories about where he might be, who he might be and whom he might be connected to.

This is where the works begin. Marsalek’s familiar face appears again and again, and each time it becomes someone else: a peasant woman in a headscarf, a flight attendant, a sailor, a figure in fur or in a spacesuit. The portraits play with the idea of a person whose actual whereabouts are unknown, and whose possible identities therefore multiply almost endlessly. The disguise becomes camouflage, but also grotesque. The more roles Marsalek is given, the more urgent the question becomes: who can still be recognised behind them?

The portraits are set against telephones and communication devices: old mobile phones, intercoms, receivers and technical relics of a world of communication that seems almost harmless and nostalgic today. In this context, however, they become instruments of information and disinformation, contact and isolation, surveillance and secrecy. Short text fragments and reported statements such as “I am not the one you are looking for” push these objects further into the absurd. What sounds like a punchline could just as well come from a spy film, if reality itself had not long since become stranger than any script.

MOST WANTED thus moves deliberately between humour and unease, portrait and masquerade, financial thriller and espionage story. The exhibition makes no attempt to solve the case journalistically. Instead, it focuses on that strange in-between zone in which a real person, through his disappearance, increasingly turns into a narrative.

Marsalek is present precisely because he is absent. We know his face, and yet we do not know which face he is wearing today.

And perhaps this is the real unsettling quality of these works: how many roles can a person play before the disguise becomes the identity?

Opening
Wednesday, 18 November 2026, 6 PM
Introduced by Christof Habres, journalist, author and art educator

Talk
Thursday, 26 November 2026, 6 PM
Simon Mraz, art historian, curator and long-time director of the Austrian Cultural Forum in Moscow, discusses how the Russian art scene has changed over the past decades.