17 Oct 2025
The Discontent Lives of Artworks: Philipp Timischl and the Poetics of Failure
Interviewby Alexander Burenkov
Philipp Timischl’s practice unfolds within a world where images collapse under their own weight, where media refuse to stay in their lanes, and where paintings, videos, and architectural fragments begin to act like moody, exhausted protagonists. In his hands, the artwork itself seems to oscillate between becoming and unbecoming—always 'on strike', always halfway to something else. Rooted in painting but never limited to it, his work expands across video, sculpture, text, architecture, and the rhetoric of display itself, creating what might be called post-digital hybrids: forms contaminated by the aesthetics of glitch, kitsch, and breakdown, yet also suffused with a dry humor and emotional undertow that complicate any purely formal reading.
What emerges in Timischl’s exhibitions—whether in the recent show Hauser & Wirth Invite(s) or his ongoing series of Hard Paintings—is a sustained interest in the instability of images, objects, and subjects under contemporary conditions of media saturation. He often speaks of his works as 'caught between fixed forms', deliberately 'confused in their formal identity'. A freestanding wall might double as a video screen, a painting might behave like a bored character refusing to perform, and a digital glitch might puncture the surface of painterly seduction. This blurring of media, Timischl suggests, reflects both a personal inability to stay loyal to any single format and a wider cultural condition shaped by the fluidity of digital images, where the old hierarchies between painting and moving image, text and surface, art object and architectural support no longer hold. Yet Timischl’s practice does not simply celebrate this fluidity. The glitches, cracks, and corruptions running through his work introduce a counterpoint, a sense of friction or even fatigue. In a culture dominated by seamless interfaces and hyper-productive images, his surfaces stutter, fail, or stall. Failure here is not tragedy but method—a way of refusing the polished effect of digital capitalism. According to the artist, there’s a kind of sincerity in breakdown, a disclosure of structure when things stop working. The moment an artwork collapses—when it admits to exhaustion or incompleteness—is, for Timischl, the moment it starts to speak. This sense of speaking is not metaphorical. Many of his works adopt voices, emotional registers, or bodily states. A title like Hard Painting (Super Sick) stages a painting as if it were going through an illness, while a sculpture recounts its own biography as a laid-off construction wall turned reluctant artwork. Elsewhere, raccoons vomit across decorative interiors, bodybuilders pose with equal parts aspiration and despair, and digital screens behave like temperamental actors. These gestures betray what might be called the discontent lives of artworks—their refusal to be mere objects of display, their oscillation between confidence and embarrassment, glamour and grotesque. In this sense, Timischl’s post-digital aesthetic operates against both modernist autonomy and postmodern irony. His hybrids, glitches, and kitschy interiors do not merely critique image culture from a distance; they inhabit its exhaustion, its overproduction, its awkward comedy. Caught between collapse and persistence, between digital smoothness and material breakdown, Timischl’s works propose a poetics of stasis and failure—a way for art to survive the present by refusing to perform it too well.
Alexander Burenkov: You often combine painting, video, text, sculpture — works “caught between fixed forms, confused in their formal identity.” How do you think about the hybridity of media in your work? Is this hybridity a condition born of digital culture, or a critique of it, or both?
Philipp Timischl: For me, hybridity is both a reflection of the digital condition and a personal need to disorganize form. I was never able to stick to one medium, maybe because my early practice in painting always felt incomplete, or because digital culture has made everything so fluid that sticking to a single format feels artificial. So I blur them. It’s not about collapsing media, but letting them feed off each other. Sometimes the digital element destabilizes the painting — glitches, subtitles, interruptions — and sometimes the painting is just there to slow things down. That tension feels close to how things are now.
Alexander Burenkov: In Hauser & Wirth Invite(s), you present works where video glitches, surfaces crack, paints or textures fail. How do you conceive failure, accident, or breakdown — not as a problem, but as a generative material or sensibility — in relation to post-digital aesthetics?
Philipp Timischl: Failure is basically my aesthetic category. Not in a tragic way, more like a mood. There's a kind of sincerity in breakdown that polished, resolved images can't offer. When surfaces fail, they reveal their structure. In Hauser & Wirth Invite(s), many works mimic the rhetoric of display but resist smoothness. Cracks, concrete textures, corrupted imagery — all of it speaks to the instability of form, or maybe just the exhaustion of it. I’m interested in that moment when an artwork stops trying to be impressive and simply says ‘something’.
Alexander Burenkov: What draws you to the aesthetic space between kitsch, beauty, and the grotesque — like the vomiting raccoons, bad interiors, or LED screens used in commercial ad context? Why do you keep returning to that?
Philipp Timischl: Because it feels real to me. That space where taste becomes questionable is where everything interesting happens. I didn’t grow up with 'good taste', and I’ve always felt slightly out of sync with the codes of high art and sophistication. So I exaggerate them, twist them. The raccoons are both cute and disgusting. The decorative interiors are seductive but also a bit desperate. It’s about what happens when aspiration becomes visible. That discomfort—somewhere between embarrassment and confidence—feels familiar. And maybe it’s also a way to challenge how class and aesthetics are so tightly linked.
Alexander Burenkov: There is a recurring sense of inertia, of figures in stasis, of works in 'unending' being. Is this inertia a symptom of post-digital overload? Or a resistance to image overproduction?
Philipp Timischl: Both, probably. I’m interested in that moment just before something happens. Or just after, when nothing really changes. Figures in my work—people, raccoons, paintings—often don’t do much. They’re tired, stuck, blank. In a world of constant visual productivity, that stillness starts to feel suspicious. But maybe it’s also a way to resist speed. I like artworks that stare back without giving anything away. Like they’re disappointed. Or on strike.
Alexander Burenkov: The show speaks of ‘discontent lives of artworks themselves’. How do you see artworks as agents — alive, decaying, narrating themselves?
Philipp Timischl: I often treat artworks like characters. They talk, they whine, they change jobs. Sometimes they want to stop being paintings and become something else: a DJ, a cop, a drag queen, a real estate agent. It’s partly a joke, but also a way of dealing with how artworks circulate—the pressure to be legible and timeless. Giving them a voice lets them complain, be confused, or push back against their role.
Alexander Burenkov: Titles like Hard Painting (Super Sick) and Hard Painting (Sleep) suggest emotional or bodily states. How do you think about affect in your work, especially through surfaces or breakdowns?
Philipp Timischl: The titles often come from things I hear or write down in my Notes app. They can be dramatic, poetic, and are often quite long. I think of affect as something that leaks — like a surface that can’t hold its form. A 'hard painting’ that collapses. A stained monochrome. I want these works specifically to feel like they’re going through something, even if it’s just a mood — something low-level, but still there.
Alexander Burenkov: How do you conceptualize memory, pastness, virtual collapse — like the wall 'slipping back’ into its past position?
Philipp Timischl: The piece you are referring to is a freestanding sculpture that’s half video wall, half painting, and built to function like a wall in the space. It tells its own story — how it used to be part of a construction site, got fired, and ended up in the gallery as an artwork. When the screen glitches to grey, it’s like it’s slipping back into a past role, not out of nostalgia, but as part of its ongoing transformation. The work shifts between surface and structure, image and object, never fully settling into one identity.
Alexander Burenkov: How do you decide when to blend the digital with the analog — or when to let one dominate?
Philipp Timischl: I don’t really follow rules for that — it depends on the work. Sometimes the digital just creeps in, or the material surface takes over. I like it when the digital tries to mimic something physical and fails. That awkwardness is where the work lives. I want the media to misbehave.
Alexander Burenkov: What is the role of the human or animal figure in your work within a post-digital world?
Philipp Timischl: The figures are often stand-ins, not portraits. The raccoons act like empty shells I can fill. The bodybuilders are maybe aspirational, maybe lost — they carry a very visible desire for transformation in their bodies. I’m interested in subjectivities that are tired of being subjects, that want to become something else, or don’t behave the way one would expect. Figures that act out of character, that deliberately mess with the rules.
Alexander Burenkov: Your works often feel funny, resigned, and exhausted. Where does that tone come from, especially in relation to class, queerness, or biography?
Philipp Timischl: Probably from growing up in a context where neither art nor queerness felt like viable paths. Humor is survival. I think a lot about 'class drag’ — performing cultural capital without ever fully owning it. That mix of confidence and insecurity. My works complain, they posture, they underdeliver. That’s part of their charm.
Alexander Burenkov: How do you treat display — walls, mouldings, gallery architecture — as part of the work?
Philipp Timischl: Display is always part of the work. Mouldings, plinths, carpet, and LED walls — they all participate. I see installation as a narrative structure. Where the viewer stands, how they move, what’s visible or obscured — all of that matters. Sometimes the work wants to be looked at. Sometimes it wants to hide. I try to choreograph that ambivalence.
Alexander Burenkov: How do you think about time — waiting, repetition, decay — in your work?
Philipp Timischl: Time is embedded in the works. Videos loop, images stall. A painting might just replay a moment forever. I like when artworks feel stuck, or tired, or hesitant. Like they’re caught in a loading screen. I want viewers to feel that lag, that sense that something might happen, even if it never does.
Alexander Burenkov: Are there new technologies or forms — not explored yet possibilities of AI, generative media, bio-materials — that you’re curious to explore next?
Philipp Timischl: Using AI in my work is also a way to talk about labor. It’s like outsourcing part of the process to something that doesn’t really know what it’s doing, but still produces something. There’s a parallel to having assistants, or to systems of delegated authorship in general — except here the assistant is invisible, tireless, and a bit stupid. The results are often off, which I like. It brings up questions about effort, value, and what kind of labor we still associate with creativity. I don’t use AI to be efficient. I use it to see what happens when the labor becomes automated, and the outcome still tries to pass as intentional.
BIOGRAPHY
Alexander Burenkov is an independent curator, cultural producer and writer based in Paris. His work extends beyond traditional curatorial roles and includes organizing exhibitions in unconventional spaces, often emphasizing multidisciplinarity, interest in environmental thinking and post-digital sensibilities, encompassing projects such as Yūgen App (launched at Porto design biennale in 2021), a show in a functioning gym or online exhibition on cloud services and alternative modes of education, ecocriticism and speculative ecofeminist aesthetics. His recent projects include Don't Take It Too Seriously at Temnikova&Kasela gallery (Tallinn, 2025), Ceremony, the main project of the 10th edition of Asia Now art fair (together with Nicolas Bourriaud, Monnaie de Paris, 2024), In the Dust of This Planet (2022) at ART4 Museum; Raw and Cooked (2021), together with Pierre-Christian Brochet at Russian Ethnographic museum, St Petersburg; Re-enchanted (2021) at Voskhod gallery, Basel, and many others.
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