Gernot Wieland

For his first solo exhibition in France, the Austrian artist is showing a selection of four films, around one hundred drawings, and a number of ceramics, displayed within installations. Gernot Wieland’s work tackles themes which are universal: language, education, otherness, domination, and religion, in first-person narratives underpinned by a perceptive psychanalytical approach.

At the beginning of each twenty-minute film is an introduction featuring wistful music, where the artist takes on the role of storyteller, his voice leading us through his childhood memories, into his dreams of legends and faraway civilisations, bringing his heroes (Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx…) back to life. Myriad images merge Claymation, Super 8 film clips, photographs, colourful children’s drawings, artworks made of paper, disturbing diagrams, and deceptively naïve sketches. Gernot Wieland’s world is inhabited by depressive animals, children who faint at the sight of martyred saints, and friends who have taken the path of madness. His films, which focus on memory and trauma, are a light-hearted portrayal of forms of therapy – the killer drone in a session with a counsellor or an entire village mimicking the shapes of healing crystals.

The films are projected within specific settings designed by the artist which immerse the viewer in the environment associated with the story. For example, the film You do not leave traces of your presence, just of your acts (2025) is projected behind a huge painted cardboard wall dotted with spyholes, inviting the viewer to observe more closely details that are quickly hidden from view. Elsewhere, series of drawings (Half Naked) are displayed on giant tables which form islands, with the public wandering between them as though among fragments of a disjointed memory. The ceramics, personifications of the super ego, denial, or emancipation, which feature in his films, are perched on pedestals that rise up ghostlike here and there throughout the exhibition. Gernot Wieland draws the public into a makeshift labyrinth, taking them back to their darkest schooldays with the horrifying classroom from the film Ink in Milk (2018). In the final part of the exhibition, where the films “Hello, my name is…”…and…“Yes, I'm fine.” (2016) and Family Constellation with a Fox (2025) are shown, the carpet is covered with an endless series of psychological mechanisms, a space where the viewer is – somewhat ironically – invited to relax.