Karl Karner & Crystin Moritz

Karl Karner
Wasserspiele

Drawing on humanity’s long tradition of shaping water, Wasserspiele presents the artist’s own interpretation of this vital element. The exhibition reflects on water in all its meanings — as a source of life, an essential resource, a symbol of wealth, a source of danger, and above all, a precious and highly endangered ecosystem. This new body of work emphasizes our profound dependency on water, reflecting an image of nature that resists imitation, control, or confinement to our human ideas of what it should look like. In his work Karl Karner opens up a broad discussion about objects, materiality, and space. Participatory impulses run through his work - viewers themselves become actors in the installations, and nature is given an essential role to develop freely in the environments the sculptures create. The unconventional, amorphous formal language of his sculptures is based on concrete models from the animal and plant world, such as mushrooms, branches, tree bark, or vineyard snails, which the artist combines into grotesque sculptural growths using casts.

Focus On
Crystin Moritz & Karl Karner

Crystin Moritz (*1987 in Magdeburg, Germany) is a Vienna-based visual artist working across photography, video, and artificial intelligence. After studying photography in Berlin, she lived in London, assisting Axel Hoedt while refining her practice.

Her work focuses on AI-generated and hybrid image-making, where analogue aesthetics collide with digital processes. Through exhibitions and collaborations in Austria and internationally, Moritz constructs precise, unsettling image systems that operate on a disturbing meta-level, collapsing boundaries between reality and simulation. Her work addresses underlying fears and destabilizes fixed ideas of identity and gender.