135. Eva Schlegel - untitled (dragonfly)

2019
Pigmentprint on Hahnemühle Bütten
17 cm x 12 cm

Eva Schlegel is an Austrian artist whose multidisciplinary practice encompasses photography, objects, installation, and spatial interventions. Working experimentally across media including photography on lead, mirror, and glass, Schlegel investigates the limits of perception and challenges conventional viewing habits through works that are simultaneously physical, atmospheric, and psychologically charged.

Her practice explores visibility, absence, reflection, and spatial ambiguity, often using transparency, layering, and material transformation to destabilise fixed ways of seeing. Since the mid-1990s, Schlegel has also realised numerous large-scale public art commissions internationally, extending her investigations of space and perception into architecture and the public realm.

She graduated from the University of Applied Arts Vienna in 1985 and served as Professor of Art and Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 1997–2006. In 2011, she was Commissioner for the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Schlegel has exhibited extensively internationally for more than three decades. Recent exhibitions and projects include Faszination Papier at the Albertina Museum, Vienna (2026); Chapters at Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, Copenhagen (2026); (K)ein Begriff at Museum Liaunig, Neuhaus (2026); Feministische Fotografie in Österreich und Italien at Fotogalerie Wien (2026); Reflexionen at Landesgalerie Burgenland (2025); Vienna Today Activating Futures at The Hai Museum of Art, Shanghai (2025); In the Now: Gender and Nation in Europe at the Brooklyn Museum, New York (2024); UNLIMITED at Art Basel (2024); multiple voices at Oklahoma Contemporary (2023); extension of public space at the Austrian Parliament (2023); Flying Eyes at MuseumsQuartier Vienna (2022); Bird Flight at Museion, Bolzano (2022); The 80ies – Die Kunst der 80er Jahre at Albertina Modern, Vienna (2021); In the Now: Gender and Nation in Europe at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2021); the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016); the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1995); and Cadences. Icon and Abstraction in Context at the New Museum, New York (1991).

Her honours include the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art (2019), the Decoration of Honour of the State of Tyrol (2017), the Golden Decoration of Merit of Vienna (2011), the Tyrolean State Prize for Art (2010), the Tyrolean State Prize for Contemporary Art (1999), the Prize of the City of Vienna (1996), and the European Photography Award, Berlin (1992).

Her work is held in major international museum and public collections including the Albertina Museum, Vienna; Belvedere Museum, Vienna; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Brooklyn Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation Vienna; the Leopold Museum; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; the New York Public Library; Deutsche Bank Art Collection, Frankfurt; the European Parliament Collection, Brussels; and numerous public and private collections internationally.