To Work and Die in Vienna

City Galerie Wien in Collaboration with Third Space
Opening, Tuesday, 7th of Aprl, 2026, 7-10pm
Mariahilferstrasse 74A, Vienna

A friend told me he has a serious problem with his lungs. The doctors gave him somewhere between one and five years. It’s not abstract. It’s the result of the materials he’s been working with for years—breathing them in, letting them settle into his body. Materials always come first. Only later do people figure out how to protect themselves from a good idea. Precautions arrive too late, after the damage is already done.

When he told me, I didn’t feel anything profound or reflective—just a blunt recalibration. My first thought was simply: you’re an idiot. Not morally. Just factually.

He got defensive.

“Am I not Seurat? Not Rauschenberg? Not Tomlin? Not Hesse??”

“Well, definitely not Curie.”

You are no hero. When a friend breathes in toxins, he is not a martyr to his work.

He is negligent.

Around the same time, we were invited to do a show in New York, at a friend’s space in Midtown. Then they lost the space, because it’s New York, or because they didn’t pay the rent.

Just like that, it was gone, and so was the show.

So we had to make it here, in Vienna, the place we had attempted to leave.