The Austrian artist Gerlind Zeilner is interested in the ambivalences within painting as well as clichéd image ideas influenced by a male-dominated history of art. In her structurally significant and thus fragile, refracted virtuosity, Zeilner works on figuratively abstract pictorial spaces full of critical and colorful allusions regarding her existence as a female painter among male painters—and as women among men. In convivial scenes of togetherness and collectively experiencing fictitious and real artist bars, generally heroic and exaggerated male gestures are interrogated critically and humorously with a special arrangement of colors and forms, and posited anew in a refreshing way, for instance, by examining bar pictures in the work of Nicole Eisenman, Jörg Immendorff, or Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

In her more recent works, Zeilner has increasingly turned to inherent questions of painting and her particular relation as an artist, which is mirrored in a reflection on her immediate workplace or analysis of various architectures as in her “Studio Pictures.” In this process, Zeilner adroitly plays with a kind of temporariness and incompleteness in painting.