We are very pleased to announce the group show Smooth Operations at our Vienna gallery, which addresses current developments in abstract painting. At its core, the exhibition asks to what extent an increasingly disruptive, confrontational world is countered by an ever more fluid, harmonious aesthetic.

Through nine exemplary positions from Germany and Austria, visual affinities and formal strategies in the transformation of non-representational pictorial language are explored against the backdrop of a permanent global, political and social state of emergency.

Abstract art was never merely form. It has always been a seismograph. In particular, abstract painting has, from its very beginnings, reflected political, technological, social and psychological upheavals. It is less an escape from reality than a condensation of it: a translation of the spirit of the time into form, colour, gesture and structure.

Especially in phases of radical disruption, abstraction has often sought counter-images. Suprematism and Constructivism formulated visions of clear order and universal structures in the midst of political and social upheaval. Informel and lyrical abstraction developed a visual language of openness, sensitivity and balance after the traumas of the Second World War. Minimalism responded to the overstimulation of consumer and media society with radical reduction and formal discipline.

What is striking is this: abstraction became particularly harmonising, structuring or calming wherever the world was experienced as fragile, threatening or unstable. Conversely, those phases in which abstraction appeared eruptive, aggressive and forceful – such as in Action Painting or Abstract Expressionism – were often shaped by relative political and economic stability. Artistic gesture could afford excess when the world did not impose it on a daily basis.

Against this background, “Smooth Operations” understands itself as an attempt to examine, through selected contemporary positions, how abstraction today responds to global upheavals, technological acceleration, ecological threats and social polarisation – and which aesthetic responses it formulates to a present marked by a permanent state of crisis.

If one observes the development of abstract painting over the past five or six years, one might put it pointedly like this: the more the world seems to falter, the more fluid the forms become. The more violently things clash outside, the more harmonious the compositions appear. The more overheated the atmosphere, the calmer and more contemplative the canvas becomes. The more irreconcilable positions, powers and people appear, the more quietly colours and surfaces interlock.

Despite their differing approaches, the works assembled in the exhibition can be read as references to this tendency. At the same time, they are united by a paradoxical moment: they do not deny the disruptive, the opaque and the fragile aspects of our time, but take them up. They translate them into pictorial worlds characterised by balance, precision and beauty. Ruptures are smoothed, disturbances are rhythmised, tensions aesthetically organised. Yet this harmony is not naïve. It carries the disturbing within it – as an intimation, as a layering, as an unstable order.

The forms appear softer, the transitions more fluid, the surfaces more controlled than in many historical precedents. Digital visual logics, industrial modes of production, new materials and individual conceptual approaches shape an abstraction that is less driven by heroic gesture than by calculated processes, shifts and superimpositions. The image becomes an interface: a site where organic appearance, algorithmic precision and subjective decision-making intersect.

Thus abstract spaces emerge that both soothe and unsettle. They suggest control and yet point to their own constructedness. They invite contemplation and at the same time make palpable how deeply our perception today is permeated by invisible systems, filters, programmes and logics of optimisation. Contemporary abstraction no longer shows the outburst, but the process. Not the explosion, but the operation.

With the exhibition title “Smooth Operations” reference is made to the processual dimension of current tendencies in abstract painting. At the same time, it alludes, with a wink, to the song “Smooth Operator” by the British pop icon Sade: a gentle, seductive hymn to a figure who seems to master every situation smoothly, skilfully and effortlessly – and is precisely for that reason elusive, leaving no traces behind. From the outset, the song has also been read as a critique: as a farewell to an attitude that uses elegance, coolness and sovereignty as a mask behind which coldness, egoism, brazenness and a will to power are concealed.

Today this figure appears with renewed urgency – not as an isolated case, but as a symptom of a social climate in which assertiveness, self-staging, narcissism and ruthless self-interest are often regarded as consensual, even desirable strengths, while responsibility, commitment and empathy are relegated to the sidelines.

The works presented in the exhibition can also be understood in this sense: as ambivalent reflections that on the one hand absorb the smooth, the agile, the sovereign, and on the other expose the obsession with power, egocentricity and relentlessness that lie beneath.

The nine artists brought together here pursue in part very different approaches, yet all find themselves within the field of tension that today inevitably inscribes itself into abstract painting – formally, materially, gesturally and conceptually:

Volo Bevza ( *1993, Kyiv, UA) frequently uses visual fragments drawn from images of war and media material from his Ukrainian homeland, which he alienates, deconstructs and transforms into abstract pictorial worlds. The disruptive and brutal are not suppressed, but translated into aesthetically organised, contemplative image spaces in which political reality remains present as a structural tension.

Jenny Brosinski ( *1984, Celle, DE) combines painting, drawing and object in gestural, often humorously fractured compositions. Her abstraction oscillates between control and loss of control, between calculated placement and eruptive line – pointing to the fragility of aesthetic order.

Joseph Heer ( *1954, Vienna, AT) develops complex pictorial spaces in which conceptual decisions, spatial structures and painterly surfaces intersect. His works reflect processes of construction, displacement and perception, negotiating abstraction as consciously organised yet fragile systems of order.

Gregor Hildebrandt ( *1974, Bad Homburg vor der Höhe, DE) works with cultural carrier media such as tape, records or cassettes. His abstract surfaces emerge from repositories of sound, memory and time. The seemingly smooth black fields bear traces of translation, erasure and condensation, turning abstraction into an archive of invisible information.

Daniel Lergon ( *1978, Bonn, DE) works with finely nuanced colour fields and precise painterly articulations. His compositions develop a fragile balance between formal clarity and latent instability. Colour appears in his work simultaneously as atmospheric, psychological and structural space.

David Ostrowski ( *1981, Cologne, DE) reduces painting to minimal interventions, traces, splashes and disturbances. His works treat the image as an operational field: as a site where the smallest gestures achieve maximum effect and emptiness becomes an active force.

Stefan Reiterer ( *1988, Waidhofen an der Thaya, AT) operates at the intersection of painting, object, space and process. His works arise from serial interventions, superimpositions and medial shifts, addressing the conditions of their own production – abstraction as an operative structure.

Markus Saile ( *1981, Stuttgart, DE) combines painterly and sculptural elements into hybrid surfaces in which organic appearance and constructive articulation meet. His works investigate the relationship between body, structure and pictorial space.

Ruscha Voormann ( *1992, Flensburg, DE) develops abstract works that are fed by processes of condensation, displacement and rhythmic ordering. Her pictorial worlds are characterised by sensitive transitions and subtle tensions between surface, depth and movement.

Together, these nine positions unfold a multifaceted panorama of contemporary abstraction – as an aesthetic practice that does not aim at escapism, but at the conscious shaping of complexity.