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Tobias Pils

Shh

Art
A black-and-white abstract image featuring figures and a starry sky.
Tobias Pils Night on Earth, 2018, Courtesy Galerie Gisela Capitain, Köln Photo: Jorit Aust © Tobias Pils

Born in Linz in 1971, Tobias Pils is among the most exciting painters working today. Employing a heavily reduced color palette, he creates paintings and drawings that weave abstract and representational elements into associative pictorial worlds. What in terms of subject matter can be interpreted as an investigation of both elementary and personal themes like birth and death or becoming and passing, also negotiates central questions in painting at large. For in Pils’ visual cosmos, one painterly mark leads to the next, one image to another, as if painting were constantly staging its own death and rebirth.

Tobias Pils lives and works in Vienna.

Bright white gallery with a striped ceiling; blue triptych on the left and a large green figure painting on the right.
Installation view Tobias Pils. Shh © mumok, Photo: Georg Petermichl
Surreal painting of a skeleton with a candle amid green, abstract shapes and geometric forms.
Tobias Pils, Geist, 2024, Courtesy the artist, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich/Vienna, and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne Photo: Jorit Aust © Tobias Pils
Abstract grayscale figure with a circular head, cross-shaped torso, and bent limbs.
Tobias Pils, Untitled (Mädchen), 2015, mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, donation Tobias Pils, 2025, Photo: Jorit Aust © Tobias Pils

mumok

Gray 3D site plan of the Museumsquartier Wien with the area marked in red at the location of the mumok
© MuseumsQuartier Wien