Heimo Zobernig  

02/05/2026 – 27/06/2026

Galerie Nagel Draxler
Weydingerstraße 2/4
10178 Berlin

Opening / Eröffnung:
Freitag, Mai 1, 2026, 18 – 21 Uhr
Friday, May 1, 2026, 6 – 9pm

Öffnungszeiten / Opening hours:
Dienstag - Freitag 11 – 18 Uhr, Samstag 12 – 18 Uhr
Tuesday - Friday 11am – 6pm, Saturday 12 – 6pm

Besondere Öffnungszeiten während des Berlin Gallery Weekends /
Special Opening hours during Berlin Gallery Weekend:
Samstag, 2. Mai 2026, 11 – 19 Uhr, Saturday, May 2, 2026, 11am – 7pm
Sonntag, 3. Mai 2026, 11 – 18 Uhr, Sunday, May 3, 2026, 11am – 6pm

One has to flee modernity for fear that it won’t save itself.

Frank Perrin, Symposium Villa Arson, Nice, 1991[1]

Heimo Zobernig started his artistic practice at the end of the 1970s, at a time when skepticism about what art can do (or be) was already rather old. Since Hegel it has been clear that art is made, but no longer true; since Adorno that nothing else about it can be taken for granted. At no time since Modernity has art been apace with its own theory.

An interest in the material and proportions of standardized objects from everyday life runs through Zobernig’s entire sculptural oeuvre. Cardboard boxes, toilet paper rolls, mannequins—things that seem to slip into our perception almost incidentally—take center stage in Zobernig’s work. From the very beginning, he has repeatedly featured the IKEA Billy bookshelf, the world’s most widely distributed mass-produced bookshelf. Zobernig creates replicas of Billy bookshelves or their parts made of particleboard or plywood, reassembles deconstructed Billy bookshelves into new sculptures, or uses store-bought ones in which he places amorphous fabric dolls in video green, red, or blue.

The latest series that we are now showing in Berlin—which could be described as a kind of “super-series”— consists of solid aluminum shelves that evoke a number of references: contemporary design, industrial aesthetics, but above all the sublime serenity of “Volumes” known from Minimal Art. Naturally, Zobernig leaves the material labels printed on the aluminum sheets by the supplier in place. The shelves are empty but have inscriptions. These inscriptions remain abstract to the art audience.

In addition, there is a fragmented human figure, also made of cast aluminum.

I was Hamlet. I stood on the coast and spoke with the surf BLABLA.
At my back, the ruins of Europe.

                                                                       Heiner Müller, Hamletmachine, 1977

When asked by New York curator Matthew Higgs which book is the most important to him, Zobernig chose the Reclam edition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. From Hamlet, one can learn that the dead are not dead; they return as ghosts. The new Hamlet paintings, which Zobernig presents here alongside the IKEA Billy bookshelf sculptures, feature the words “Hamlet total abstrakt” or “Hamlet totally abstract.” In Zobernig’s work, these canvases fall into the category of typographic compositions that generally do not evoke specific content, but rather present tautologies or individual terms—such as “painting,” “video,” “REAL EGAL,” or “LOVE”—as if they were presented on a stage.

Zobernig, who studied stage design and who, in 1982, created a set for Heiner Müller’s play Quartett before devoting himself exclusively to his work as an artist, brings Hamlet's ghost onto the stage of his art and, at this time and in this place, also the ghost of Heiner Müller.

1977 was marked by the following events:
HEINER MÜLLER published HAMLETMASCHINE, written in 1977 it was first officially performed in the GDR in 1989. // HEIMO ZOBERNIG moved to Vienna. // Vienna's first IKEA opened...

Heimo Zobernig (*1958 Mauthen, Austria) is one of the most renowned artists working in Europe today. He has exhibited extensively all over the world and created a considerable body of work that includes painting, sculpture, video, installation, architectural interventions and performance. These carry his exploration of modernism, monochrome and grids, as well as constructivism, minimalism, color theory, and geometric abstraction. He engages with modernist iconography to question the ideological position and conditions which underpin them, subverting and reinterpreting them with a lightness of touch and an economy of material, means and methodology that is at turns playful, dry, witty, unsettling and disarming. Since 2000 he has been Professor of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Solo exhibitions include mumok Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah, Museum Ludwig Cologne, Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, Austrian Pavillon, 56. Biennale di Venezia, Venice, MUDAM Luxembourg, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, CAPC, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, among others. In 2016, he was awarded the prestigious Roswitha Haftmann Prize. Zobernig lives and works in Vienna.

[1] In the accompanying exhibition, Heimo Zobernig displayed a black cardboard cube in a kind of staged setting. When Dirk Snauwaert invited him to a solo exhibition at the Kunstverein München in 1992, Zobernig “reenacted” the Nice Symposium there.