We are delighted to present the exhibition Petrol M*other by Ashley Hans Scheirl in our gallery. Following the major retrospective at Belvedere 21 and the participation in Lives and Works in Vienna at the Kunsthalle, Scheirl now shows a new series of works exploring questions of individual identity within a technoid, capitalist, and artificially intelligent universe.

The new paintings by Ashley Hans Scheirl in the exhibition Petrol M*other continue themes from earlier works while developing them further in a new body of work. One striking motif is the crane, which has already appeared in Scheirl’s previous works—from painting to kinetic bricolages.

While cranes have historically been associated with industrialization and the engineering of modernity (for example in the work of Fernand Léger or Charles Sheeler), in Scheirl’s work they primarily function as metaphors for rotation, transformation, and the crossing of boundaries. They stand for swaying movement, an extension into space, for swinging, turning, shifting, and lifting—in other words, for the transition from surface to space, from illusion to installation, from painting to overpainting. Oil rigs and other industrial structures also appear, likewise becoming carriers of transferred meaning. Pipes and channels resemble internal vessels; liquids drip; technical constructions take on the appearance of organs; conduits evoke intestines, while conversely the bodily assumes something constructed, almost machine-like.

The oil platforms, supplemented by sequences of numbers and stock market data from the Financial Times, are taken by Scheirl from the Duden pictorial dictionary. They are scanned and then transferred onto paper by means of poster printing. Oil is closely connected to the dynamics of modernity—today, of course, above all with the exploitation of nature and the climate crisis, but in Scheirl’s work also with capitalist profit-seeking as well as bodily fluids. Oil splashes, flows, pollutes; it appears like an unwanted secretion and leaves traces. At the same time—and this is crucial—it also refers to painting itself.

For oil is not merely treated thematically within the image; it also points to the material of painting. While petroleum repeatedly became a subject in earlier works, those paintings were executed in acrylic. Unlike oil paint, the binding medium for acrylic paint is derived from petroleum, whereas oil paints are based on vegetable oils. In the new series shown at Galerie Crone under the title Petrol M*other, Scheirl uses oil paint in the form of oil sticks.

Scheirl explains that they wanted to leave behind the long-standing practice of digital design. Previously, motifs were usually transferred onto the canvas at a one-to-one scale. Otherwise, it would scarcely have been possible to develop such complex pictorial ideas. Arrangements were tested on the monitor, as were the fragments typical of Scheirl’s work, isolating them and opening up surreal coexistences. In the new body of work, especially in the smaller formats of the series (each 42 × 30 cm), the compositions instead emerge “through the making,” that is, in a more direct, analog artistic process. The larger paintings, in turn, build upon these smaller ones, which serve as notes, preliminary drawings, and excerpts.

The support itself is also new. Prints of the illustrations taken from the Dudenpictorial dictionary are glued onto wood. Scheirl emphasizes that this technique—contrary to expectations—allows for corrections, not only overpainting but also the removal of individual sections. The composition therefore remains mutable. Parts can be detached, shifted, or removed entirely. In this way, the manual process gains greater significance.

This working method is also visible in other respects. Whereas Scheirl previously introduced effects of spatial illusion into the pictorial organization, signs now enter the composition: markings and pictorial abbreviations. They consist of materials whose differences produce strong contrasts: extra-matte charcoal hatchings stand beside impasto passages overpainted with glossy markers. Through the transparency of layered surfaces, unexpected effects emerge. Motifs appear subcutaneously, literally like glimmers beneath the skin.

Some of these markings resemble signets, others fragments of bodies, and still others punctuation marks—indications, brackets, or insertions. They refer equally to the body and sexuality as to the use of language, which particularly in the context of queerness calls for processes of adaptation and mutation.

That ambiguity and transformation play a significant role becomes evident, among other things, in a reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous drawing, the so-called duck-rabbit image. Scheirl cites this motif as a silhouette in front of an oil rig and above a channel, connected to a densely hairy head. The focus lies on the shifting perceptual effect. What moments before appeared as a machine suddenly becomes legible as a body; what looked like a body part transforms into an abstract formation.

Particularly noteworthy is the drawing, which inscribes itself into the paintings as a pictorial quality. Dense lines appear throughout all the works, in color but especially in gray and black. According to Scheirl, it is “erotic” to work with fine points, with varying degrees of hardness in pencil or colored pencil, but also with markers, chalks, and pastel pencils. The emphasis lies less on the surface than on the line as a point of contact with the surface.

In conclusion, Scheirl understands paintings in this body of work not as closed, fully composed surfaces, but rather as an open, corporeal, and above all experimental space. Within it, material, motif, and meaning continuously overlap and intertwine. Although technical drawings underlie the works, the paintings ultimately orient themselves toward the body—a body whose supposed identity constantly eludes fixation under the effects of desire and mutation.

Thomas Trummer 

Director, Kunsthaus Bregenz

Ashley Hans Scheirl (b. 1956, Salzburg) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and at Central Saint Martins College in London. In recent years, she has exhibited at documenta 14 in Athens/Kassel, the Künstlerhaus Graz, the Kunsthaus Bregenz, the Lyon Biennale, the Venice Biennale, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, among other venues. In 2025, her first major solo museum retrospective took place at the Belvedere 21 in Vienna. She was recently awarded the Oskar Kokoschka Prize together with her partner Jakob Lena Knebl.