LAYR - Vienna

In their just initiated new collaborative curatorial enterprise Kristoffer Cezinando Karlsen and Josef Strau will show some friends in two very distinctively influential Viennese galleries. At Layr and at City. Leading out of broader and more general cultural stagnation, New Vienna Energy becomes attached with what was and what is known, with a the subject unknown and other usual reductions. The complex artists list will connect the spirit of this particular general moment of the finally growing city with the international cultural phenomena of a still uncategorized change of artists self perceptions into artists self awareness. Because of phenomena like this one a place and a group can become an attractor. This long searched for but then just happens by chance. This is moment, this epoch, this attractor is until this day unnamed. Imagining it as a convention of artists, underlined by including a third space to the two so explicitly distinguished gallery spaces. A studio used for live events and parties, music and reading, drinking and talking. Dedicated to new conversations to the recent condition of artists, being here and now and how to make as much as possibly, making it a festival of events of celebrating the power of whatever subjectivities, celebrating the paradoxes, the contradictions and individualities from an a priori state of confusion and anxieties. Very simple. Subjectivity means without seeking for permission and suggests not sharing it at all. Leaving the first and second space and moving on into a third one that hopefully wont be as revisionist and formal, in conditions that are more livable and less useless.

[PARA] Leah Ke Yi Zheng’s upcoming exhibition presents a complete series of 64 paintings based on the hexagrams of the I Ching (Book of Changes), a foundational text in Chinese philosophy. Each painting reflects on a hexagram not through literal representation, but through an evolving visual language shaped by abstraction, intuition, and the interplay of light and material. Working with silk, hardwood, and hand-built stretchers, Zheng brings together traditional Chinese techniques and conceptual art methodologies to explore transformation, multiplicity, and the logic of impermanence. Her practice is influenced by thinkers such as John Cage and Yuk Hui, and rooted in a dialogue between Eastern and Western modes of thought. In this project, the I Ching is not only a reference—it is a method, a structure, and a philosophical companion. The exhibition becomes a meditation on change itself: how it is read, made visible, and experienced through painting. [PARA] Curated by Myriam Ben Salah and Karsten Lund. [PARA] LEAH KE YI ZHENG (b.1988, China) lives and works in Chicago. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Machine(s) at Layr, Vienna (2025); I-Ching/Machine at Mendes Wood DM, New York (2025); Leah Ke Yi Zheng at Mendes Wood DM, Brussels (2024); John Cage, Leah Ke Yi Zheng: The Grasshopper Lies Heavy at Castle Gallery, Los Angeles (2024); Leah Ke Yi Zheng at David Lewis Gallery, New York (2023); and Currency @ Swiss National Bank, Zurich at Soccer Club Club, Chicago (2021). Recent group exhibitions include New Museum, New York (2025); Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp (2023); and Caffé Centrale, Monte Castello di Vibio (2022) among others. She was awarded a 2019 – 2021 Fellowship from The Arts Club of Chicago.

From 14 June 2025 to 2 February 2026, in an exceptional collaboration with the Musée du Louvre, the Centre Pompidou-Metz will be presenting an unusual exhibition dedicated to the creativity of copyists. Copying was central to the classical tradition. Copying the works of great artists is a tool for learning about the canons, techniques and stories. Absorbing their expertise and adopting their mastery is a pathway to knowledge and artistic creation, from the most academic to the most contemporary. A number of artists have received the following invitation from the two curators: ‘Imagine a copy of a work of your choosing from the collections of the Musée du Louvre.’

Curated by Audrius Pocius Medūza is pleased to present the 60s, Anna-Sophie Berger’s first solo exhibition in Lithuania and the Baltics, featuring a newly commissioned body of work. The show builds on Berger’s recent investigations into the conceptual, social, and aesthetic dimensions of fashion design, and how the contradictions inherent therein shape contemporary perception. This line of inquiry has become a recurring and widely recognized motif in her artistic practice, articulated in exhibitions such as Something for Everyone, Everything for No One in collaboration with Teak Ramos (International Library of Fashion Research, Oslo, 2025), The Years (MAK Geymüllerschlössel, 2023), Mode und Tod (Galerie Emanuel Layr, 2023), and Wealth and Propriety (Lodos Gallery, Mexico City, 2022). On this occasion, The 60s is framed by two apparently distinct sets of archival images. The first comprises functional, decidedly non-fashion-oriented designs in drawings, sketches, and textile patterns by members of the Artists’ Association’s Soviet-era textile section, spanning the late 1960s to the late 1980s. The second consists of photographs scanned from a polaroid album assembled by the artist’s grandmother as a gift to her father. Taken in the 1960s, they depict clients of the family’s jewelry factory in Austria, seated in the showroom while selecting seasonal styles and placing orders. The apparent distance between these two sets of images is contradicted by an implied narrative of shifting aesthetic codes, shaped by large-scale geopolitical transformations and their effects on lived material conditions. The closure of the “Berla” factory in 2005, prompted in part by the EU’s expansion and the influx of cheaper labor from the member states, parallels how the standardized, uniform codes rehearsed by mid-century designers in Lithuania gradually gave way to Western trends. In a gesture that mirrors this juxtaposition, Berger presents four new sculptures composed of two pairs of modular forms, each of which can be rearranged and exhibited in stacked or expanded configurations. Echoing the design and material choices present in the aforementioned series of images, the sculptures are dressed in diverse fabrics — some unicolored, others patterned with graphics or houndstooth, wool and synthetics. The exhibition unfolds across the ground floor of Medūza, extending into the Videocapsule screening room, where a selection of 94 photographs from the photo album will be shown as a slideshow accompanied by the looped second studio album of Led Zeppelin (1969). Extending beyond Medūza, a selection of images from the archive of the Lithuanian Artists’ Union will be presented in a display at the Union’s office located at 2 Vokiečių Str., Vilnius.