Ashley Hans Scheirl, 'Libidinal Economy’s Special Effects', 2016

Wall painting, Restrooms, Level 0, Building D

Ashley Hans Scheirl created a wall painting in the area that fronts a publicly accessible restroom facility. Her work, which can also be viewed from the street through the building’s glass windows, combines a multitude of references and expressive forms. Abstract and figurative painting, text fragments, sex, genders, and economics converge and give rise to dynamic energies. Cosmic-seeming explosions interlace with pictograms and disembodied objects shaped like phalluses and lips, fountains of liquid, pairs of eyes, and a set of human teeth that hover within the space. In their interplay with theses on the “Libidinal Economy” by Jean-François Lyotard and in their own plays on words, these instances of hybrid interweaving give rise to a dimension that is critical while at the same time possessed of a cartoon-like humor. “As if there were an economy of lust, voracity for creditworthiness and for creditors without faith in a turmoil of Catholic-tinged indignation at failure to follow the heritage and the banner of debts for duty’s sake,” writes Andreas Spiegl on Scheirl’s artwork. Something baroque flares up here and latches on to the usual separation of public restrooms into male and female genders as well as a disabled category, all of which Ashley Hans Scheirl helps bring together to form a single whole in her transformative painterly universe.

Ashley Hans Scheirl, born in Salzburg in 1956, lives and works in Vienna. In the context of Austrian art since the 1960s and ’70s, the works by Ashley Hans (Angela) Scheirl trace an important process of development at the interface of experimental film, public space actions, performance, music, and forms in which to express lesbian and queer sexuality. Her works have been seen at international exhibitions, film festivals, and venues such as Innsbruck’s Taxispalais, the New Museum in New York, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, the MUSA in Vienna, Zurich’s Shedhalle, the Nova Galerija in Zagreb, the Semperdepot location of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, the Museu d’Art Contemporani in Barcelona, and the Museum moderner Kunst in Vienna.

Text: Kathrin Rhomberg & Pierre Bal-Blanc