We are very pleased to announce the exhibition Otto Zitko | Cardboards at our Vienna gallery. On view are two new series in which Zitko— known for his expansive, wall-filling meshes of lines—turns to smaller, more intimate works on cardboard.

“Otto Zitko is the painter of the present”—this, or something along these lines, could serve as the opening of almost any text on his work. The notion of the present, understood as a state of constant immediacy, plays a central role in the experience of his paintings.

But what is it that is present in the image—as image?

Zitko’s works emerge in a field of tension between what can be represented in or as painting and its complete dissolution; a dissolution that has shed all reference to the object world by refusing, with all the means of art, its conventional hierarchies of meaning. Even occasional traces of figuration must therefore be understood only as part of the painterly language or grammar—thus as immanent to the image as density, drawing, color, gesture, and line.

“Not representational but present” and “not abstract but rather analytical-performative” may serve as useful terms of description—yet “Untitled” already says more than a thousand words.

For Otto Zitko is, through and through, a painter of images; his works are distillations of painting—painterly articulations that, in their radical singularity and autonomy, are capable of inducing endless astonishment—another expression of (overwhelming) presence.

“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it…,” writes Ludwig Wittgenstein; “ABSOLUTELY CAPTIVATING,” as it reads on so many paperback covers.

With his most recent series, the Cardboards, Otto Zitko turns to smaller, more intimate formats. He creates “panel paintings” of a touching, landscape-like openness (Untitled, 2024), and of concentrated, portrait-like intensity (Untitled, 2026).

It almost seems as though the artist, having set out to describe the world through his expansive, space-encompassing works, returns to the studio in order to re-examine the classical motifs of painting from the ground up.

The works he now presents read like a treatise on painting—one that, in its pointedness, recalls Vermeer’s The Art of Painting (De Schilderkunst), where the creation of the image is articulated through the very means of image-making. An all-encompassing presentness as a conceptual loop of viewing—or, as mentioned at the outset: “Otto Zitko is the painter of the present.”

Gregor Schmoll, 2026