2025
STRABAG Art Site, Vienna
STRABAG Art Award International – main prize
Nana Mandl impressed the jury with her painterly fabric collages. Her works stand out for their significant connection between materiality, form, color, and contemporary themes. The exhibition now provides an overview of Nana Mand’s body of work and presents new pieces.
Nana Mandl’s works offer a pause in the accelerated image machine of mass and social media, immersing viewers in individual moments captured by a cellphone camera. The artist, born in Graz and having studied in Berlin and Vienna, explores with the sensually tactile materials she uses the seemingly insignificant details that unconsciously appeal to us, draw our attention, and possibly contradict the actual intention of the photo. As both figurative and abstract elements, Mandi translates these into digital prints and drawings on textiles and canvases, in overpaintings, collages, and embroideries.
Sometimes, it is just pixelated remnants of information from which she develops her motifs, transferring them from the digital to the three-dimensional material realm or into installation arrangements. The textiles used by Mandl come from her personal collection, were gifted to her, or found at flea markets; dyeing and bleaching extend the palette of the colors provided. In terms of her materials as well, Nana Mandl is committed to working with what already exists.
Text: Anna-Catharina Gebbers
Photos:
© Rudi Froese and Nana Mandl