Installation Views
Photos: © Matthias Aschauer
I play, ludo, it says here. The title of the exhibition thereby names, on the one hand, its subject — play — and, on the other, emphasises the dimension of the playful, which can shield artistic creation from disturbance or scrutiny. Leave me be, I’m playing. I’m just playing.
The image of a child playing in its room imposes itself. With its lower lip thrust forward, it dismissively towards the open door. As soon as the curious, yet controlling gaze from outside withdraws, it will place the waggon in its hand on the wooden tracks running across the floor. In the mind’s eye, there is a play shop directly beside it where imitations of objects alrea dy familiar to the child are offered for sale. The apple is neither sweet nor tart but wooden or made of plastic. The ringing of the cash register rewards every successful sale. Beneath clouds on the walls and plastic stars glowing in the dark, at night the child dreams of booming business and trains roaring off into the distance. Beyond this room lies the vastness of the universe—which doesn’t even seem far-fetched, since here, in the first years of life, is where the whole world unfolds.
From the elevated perspective of adults, it seems obvious that children learn, through play, the norms and phenomena to which they will later have to submit. For example, the railway—a vehicle of trade and industrialisation—and its tracks—a strategic infrastructure of warfare and colonialism—do n’t transport goods in children’s rooms, but rather the idea of movement and logistics. With his Homo Ludens, published in 1938 shortly before the start of World War II, Johan Huizinga put forward a notion attempting to capture the fundamental role of play in different areas of society: Through play, humans learn, among other things, the rules and rituals applied in art, law, and science—as well as the possibility of transgression.
When marbles roll out of the run or a game is lost, it shows that something is at stake here. Apart from a sense of disappointment, however, the negative outcome of a game carries no conse quences. What’s at stake is one’s own enjoyment, the goal being that it never ceases. This self-purpose of play marks the magic circle that, according to Huizinga, maintains a distance from the utilitarian creations of Homo Faber.
Something similar surrounds art, which—though as a differentiated field of work within capitalism it has left behind the naivety of creative activity—asserts its partial autonomy from worldly contexts through a comparable magic circle.
Play, lude, was the prompt this text has only partially succeeded in following. It, too, is sub ject to rules that hold up a mirror to the self-forgetfulness of play. First, orthography, grammar, and logic in order for others to play along at all. But also the conventions of a given context, the obligations of authorship, and the temptation to abandon playfulness in favour of meaning-making. While the exhibition still has all things possible to offer, the text labels the commodity and sets its price: associations are evoked, references drawn upon, and interpretations suggested. And as soon as the cash register clinks open, everything that could still be anything is laid down.
Text by Leonie Huber
Installation Views
Photos: © kunst.dokumentation.com / Manuel Carreon Lopez
cosmo marks the first chapter of a three-part exhibition: an assembly of puzzle pieces that reveal their logic, space, time, and matter, only when considered as a whole. In this opening chapter each object mirrors another, not through likeness but through the material echo of its form, as if worlds, planets, and invented universes had collided in an overcrowded playground. Here a toylike sense of shelter and exposure coexists, the comfort of miniature environments alongside the disquiet of being too seen, too close. Smooth surfaces and tightly choreographed forms amplify a subtle fetishism of objects, a seduction of precision and excess. Crossing a threshold through a peephole (or Katzenloch) the viewer enters a space that is cramped yet strangely affirming. It is where surreal objects that should not belong still reflect one another, proposing harmony through contradiction, awkwardness, and proximity. The so-called Big Bad Wolf is a pivotal presence capable of shifting the tone in this compressed environment. The wolf becomes a cipher for the friction between instinct and civilization, wildness and danger, yet bound by loyalty. It embodies the shadowed parts of the self that seek both independence and belonging, the undomesticated and the domesticated simultaneously. Unlike a dog or cat, the Big Bad Wolf cannot be tamed as it stands for the unknown, a presence that resists control and familiarity. Throughout human storytelling, it has carried our fears, warnings, and desires. Capable of mirroring what we do not understand in ourselves. This is a moment we cannot fully comprehend, yet trespassing becomes a way of moving through this space. Objects point, redirect, and convert, suggesting pathways without ever really settling them. A motif that signals transition recurs obsessively in Scholz’s work: the doorknob. After crossing into this cramped interior, doorknobs represent the moment before entering or exiting, the pause in which change is negotiated. Another marker of transition is time, represented by the cuckoo clock serving as both alarm and the temporal passage within this micro-universe. The clock evokes rhythm and order, symbolizing routine, and the human desire to organize and measure life. A decay-like atmosphere permeates the scene, holes in shelf-like structures, bitten houses, eroded landscapes, and fallen birds. Within this cosmology, precision, playfulness, and excess are fraying at the edges. After all, cosmo is only the first part of three, a conversational opener rather than a conclusion. What follows remains deliberately unfinished.
Text by Anna Hugo
Group show at ES49, Vienna, 2025 Installation views
Photos: © Julia Bertermann
cabinet (a summary), 2025
beech plywood, lime, oak, oil, acrylic glass
Group show at Laurenz, Vienna, 2023 Installation views
Photos: © Aaron Amar Bhamra
script 4 (out off order), 2023
polystyrene, acrylic glass, pvc, pigmented acrylic resin, mdf,
spruce, cutlery tray, aluminium, laquer, pla, pigmented polyurethane foam
Group show at Gallery XY, Olomouc, 2023Installation views
Photos: © Lukas Matuschek, © Sebastian Scholz
script 3 (try routine), 2023
polystyrene, acrylic glass, pvc, pigmented acrylic resin, mdf, polyester,
spruce, aluminium, laquer, cutlery tray, pigmented polyurethane foam
script 2 (choo choo), 2022
polystyrene, acrylic glass, plastics, pigmented acrylic resin,
aluminium, spruce, laquer, pla, polyester
script 1 (proof is in the pudding), 2022
polystyrene, acrylic glass, plastics, acrylic resin,
pigments, wood, aluminium, pla, polyester
pigments, wood, aluminium, pla, polyester
Group show at Laurenz, Vienna, 2021Installation views
Photos: © Aaron Amar Bhamra
Group show at Parallel, Vienna, 2019Installation views
Photos: © Sebastian Scholz