Gerlind Zeilner is interested in the tensions and ambiguities within painting, including pictorial ideas shaped by a male-dominated art history that tends to the clichéd. In her structural significant and therein fragile, broken virtuosity, Zeilner works on figurative-abstract pictorial spaces full of critical and colorful suggestions about the existence of a female painter among male painters—of women among men. In connection to the exhibition “Cowgirls” at Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien a bilingual catalogue will be published after an idea by Gerlind Zeilner and with graphic design by Thomas Kussin, with numerous illustrations of her current painting and drawing as well as texts by Jurriaan Benschop, Sandro Droschl, Denise Milstein, and Thomas Raab. As part of the catalog presentation there will be an artist talk with Gerlind Zeilner and Sandro Droschl.

Gerlind Zeilner (*1971 Mödling, lives in Vienna) studied painting and graphic art with Gunter Damisch at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna and took over as head of life drawing there in 2017. Zeilner has had numerous exhibitions and been awarded the Würdigungspreis of the Austrian Ministry of Research and Art (1998), the Georg Eisler Preis (2005), and the Anton-Faistauer-Preis (2008). This is her largest solo presentation thus far, and it will continue in December 2020 at Kunst im Traklhaus in Salzburg.