ALBA Gallery

Lars Eidinger creates pointed images. Like an aphorism or a joke, almost every one of his photographs makes a point. To what extent this becomes a punctum, a point that affects or indeed “pierces” us, as Roland Barthes has put it in his photo theory Camera Lucida, has, naturally enough, just as much to do with us, with how much we open up and let ourselves be touched by the images. In analogy with aphorisms, the danger with these succinct images is that we do not take them seriously enough and are happy with just discovering their point. But to shrug them off (or revel in them) as simply ironic, means however to deprive them of their explosiveness and fails to give them the appreciation they deserve. Contrary to “system-conforming” irony, Eidinger demands a new earnestness. This, however, does not mean that his images are not funny, for — as G.K. Chesterton noted as early as 1906 — we are deceiving ourselves when we think that “funny is the opposite of serious.” He explains: Whether a man choses to tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he choses to tell the truth in French or in German. Whether a man preaches his gospel grotesquely or gravely is merely like the question whether he preaches it in prose or verse. Klaus Speidel, 2022

Solo shows 2023 Overlooking | Stadtgalerie Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt Festival 2022 GOOD GOSH | ALBA Salzburg Happy Garten | Ruttkowski;68, Paris ƎVI⅃ | ALBA Gallery, Vienna Group shows 2022 Everyday | Innsbruck International Biennale of the Arts | Kunstpavillon – Tiroler Künstler:innenschaft, Innsbruck 2021 – 2022 Klasse Gesellschaft. Alltag im Blick niederländischer Meister. Mit Lars Eidinger und Stefan Marx | Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg 2020 TWO IN ONE. Erwin Wurm & Lars Eidinger | Ruttkowski;68, Cologne Mixed Pickles 8 | Ruttkowski; 68, Wilhelm Hallen Berlin 2019 Mixed Pickles 6 | Ruttkowski; 68, Cologne Mixed Pickles 5 | Ruttkowski; 68, Funkhaus Berlin 2018 Rue Charlot | Ruttkowski; 68, Paris Lichtstraße | Ruttkowski; 68, Cologne

Founded in 2022 ALBA Gallery is representing its thematically intrinsic program by bringing exceptional exhibitions to life, interconnected by their transdisciplinary approach. Driven by a keen interest in the wide-ranged conditions of human identity, ALBA‘s program explores this spectrum ­in all its beauty and cruelty. Being attracted by the aesthetics of both the immensely atrocious as well as the overwhelmingly beautiful, we all as human beings deal with universal issues, everyone can find a part of themselves in. What makes us human? What is real/life? Where do we position ourselves within these concepts, what motivates our urge to then escaping from them and where do we anticipate to find ourselves once this process is successful? The undeniable disparity between what we – as a society – commonly agree upon as real life and our individually received reality – aligned to the purpose of prevarication – remains uncanny and self-destructive behavioural patterns reflect on the paradigms of contemporary times and emotional mechanisms, as seductive illusions consume us with heart and soul. ALBA embraces those identity fomenting directions emerging from plurality, proprioceptively renegotiating the fragility of both the physical and the virtual self and its realities.