To begin with, can you tell us something about the artistic/biographical context of Julia S Goodman? To what extent is this connected to her works in the exhibition?

Julia comes from a painting background, having studied in the Fine Arts department at NYU, before completing her diploma here in Vienna with Julian Göthe. Over the course of those years – 2009 to 2020 – her exploration of the limits of painting, or more specifically, her love for the material and its functions, expanded outwardly into installation and sculptural works. With this exhibition, she continues this strategy by questioning where and how the canvas can exist as both an object and an image. She does so by incorporating sculptural practices in her painterly process.

For me, the exhibited works are primarily about the theme of seeing. Viewers are invited to look in a variety of directions. In the gallery space itself, but also when looking at the works, the most diverse dimensions and perspectives can be discovered.

Absolutely. There is such an overabundance of information that it takes some time to recalibrate oneself in the show – actually this is something one maybe has to do multiple times over the course of a visit.

Conventionally exhibition spaces are there to help present works in a digestible manner: museums have benches, paintings are hung at a standard height. Julia is more interested in proposing a more “realistic” relationship to her work. The process of viewing them is one with many detours, but this demand for attention, coming from all of the varying materials, is what supports her curiosity with painting as a medium. She is making fun of her own painterly self, and of the preciousness of painting in general. All of the images and objects on the glass and inside the “vitrines” are in the way of the canvas, but ultimately equal contributors to the narrative of the work.