Heimo Zobernig is a key figure in European contemporary art. Since the 1980s, he has developed a polymorphic practice encompassing painting, sculpture, installation, video and performance, grounded in a sustained critical engagement with the languages of modernism, minimalism and exhibition-making.
Zobernig’s work revisits geometric abstraction and functionalist ideals, subtly undermining their authority through displacement, irony and conceptual precision. His paintings and installations are inseparable from their architectural context, activating space through colour, scale and material while questioning how meaning is constructed and perceived.
He represented Austria at the Venice Biennale in 2015, following major solo exhibitions at Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2012) and Museum Ludwig (Cologne, 2016), among others, including Kunsthaus Bregenz, Mudam Luxembourg and Malmö Konsthall. His work stands out for its capacity to transform modernist vocabularies into open fields of experimentation—rigorous yet playful, intellectually demanding yet immediately accessible.