With her work in progress, Hannah Stippl has turned the retaining walls of the Ernst Arnold Park in Vienna’s fifth municipal district into the ground for a dialogically oriented artistic intervention in response to the sprayer and graffiti scene which had long since taken hold of these surfaces. Her wall painting draws on natural, botanical, plantlike structures. These repetitive elements, consisting of color fields and applied with the aid of paint rollers, are not aimed at a mimetic depiction, though. They rather evoke an ambiguous impression of naturalness. The intervention has transformed the transition area into the model of an artwork open to change and aimed at social exchange.

Does Hannah Stippl’s partly impressionist representation in public space per se imply an aestheticization? If read this way work in progress would be nothing but an escapist projection surface. If one considers the work’s systemic dimension, however, Stippl’s project presents itself as a painterly interventionist dispositif: the wall painting actually calls for others’ overpaintings and inscriptions. It unfolds an open aesthetic system that questions sociocultural and, ultimately, politically determined categorizations and bounds between subject and public as well as author and recipient and puts them to the test.

Text: David Komary