Esther Stocker I Clemens Wolf
22 January – 15 March 2025
Franz-Josefs-Kai 3/16, 3rd floor
1010 Wien
Opening times
Wed – Fri 12 – 6 pm
Sat 12 – 4 pm
Closed on bank holidays
The exhibition brings together the works of Esther Stocker (*1974, Schlanders, South Tyrol) and Clemens Wolf (*1981, Vienna) for the first time.
Esther Stocker’s work is grounded in geometric order, exploring the tension between structure and disarray. Her use of grids as a central motif generates intricate spatial systems that oscillate between clarity and disorientation. Through minimalist interventions in painting, installation, and sculpture, Stocker employs a restrained visual language of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal axes, combined with a monochromatic palette of black, white, and grey. These deliberate constraints allow her to explore the fragility of order and its susceptibility to disruption.
Clemens Wolf, on the other hand, originates from street art and has developed a practice that addresses the aesthetics of decay and transformation. His works—spanning painting, sculpture, and installation—investigate the interplay between material permanence and visual deception. Drawing on elements such as fences, ruins, or city maps, Wolf creates works that blur the boundaries between subcultural aesthetics and contemporary art. He challenges the materiality of his chosen mediums by transforming steel into delicate forms or paper into objects with unexpected weight, revealing tensions between materiality and its perception.
The works of Esther Stocker and Clemens Wolf engage in a dialogue that makes the tension between geometric order and collapse aesthetically tangible. While Stocker uses minimal interventions to reflect on the grid as a fragile system, Wolf explores the limits of control and dissolution with material inversions and illusions. Together, their works encourage us to take a fresh look at the mechanisms of structure and transformation of space.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is Esther Stocker’s Creased Sculpture (2023), which occupies the middle of the space suspended from the ceiling. Smaller versions are installed in the upper corners of the room, directing the viewer's gaze towards unexpected sites for an exhibition space. Stockers Creased Sculptures are based on regular grid structures that are ‘deconstructed’ through deliberate crumpling. The intervention transforms the apparent order into a network of complex distortions and opens up an exciting interplay between structure and designed chaos.
On the walls, a series of untitled black-and-white paintings continues the exploration of the grid, where subtle disturbances challenge the perception of regularity and stability. These irregular patterns suggest a kind of camouflage—highlighting, rather than concealing, the tension between control and variation.
Clemens Wolf presents his latest Expanded Metal Paintings (2025), which introduce a new aspect to his practice. The process involves applying red oil paint through expanded metal onto blue paper, creating gestural abstractions with an almost relief-like surface. The works are framed in alternating combinations of red or blue, emphasizing the materiality of the paint and the tactile imprint of the metal.
While Wolf’s process inherently involves repetition, the resulting works retain their individuality and energy, embodying the physicality of their creation. This reflection on transience and the documentation of architectural relics permeates Wolf's entire artistic practice and lends the series a conceptual depth. A diptych created from two metal plates, Expanded Metal Pigment Painting (2019), complements the series in the room. Here, the diamond structure of expanded metal is clearly recognisable as one of Clemens Wolf's main working materials.
In the middle of the room, in dialogue with Esther Stocker's suspended Crumpled Sculpture, is a sculpture from the Parachute Sculptures series—a decommissioned parachute treated with coloured epoxy resin. At first glance, the sculpture gives the impression of wetness, softness and heaviness, but surprises with its actual dryness, lightness and hardness. The sculpture's deception of perception can only be uncovered by touching it, an approach that the artist consciously allows and incorporates into his artistic strategy.
Wolf’s Expanded Metal Pigment Corner Painting (2019) further adds to this idea of deception. This anamorphic circle transforms depending on the viewer’s perspective. From one specific angle, the circle appears complete, but from other positions, it fragments into elliptical forms that question the relationship between two-dimensionality and spatial illusion. By navigating the work, viewers are encouraged to experience shifts in perception, as the two-dimensional surface alternates with the illusion of three-dimensional space.
The exhibition encourages a layered exploration of order and transformation. Stocker deconstructs the rhetoric of geometry through minimal yet intentional disruptions, exposing its vulnerabilities. Wolf places materiality in a state of tension, interrogating questions of stability and impermanence. Together, their works engage in a dialogue that examines the fragile balance between structure and entropy, prompting the viewer to reflect on the mechanisms that sustain and destabilise systems.
Text: Livia Klein
Photos: Florian Langhammer
