Der Grund auf dem ich stehe (2025-26)
Der Grund auf dem ich stehe, 2025–2026
Mixed media painting, installation, and video/performance works
Der Grund auf dem ich stehe began with a line from Heidegger I keep returning to: “Vom Abgrund sprechen wir dort, wo es vom Grund weggeht und uns ein Grund fehlt.” We speak of the abyss where the ground gives way, where a ground is missing to us. I chose tarp as my material because it is flexible, non-absorbent, and resistant, more ground than surface. Abstract fields of color came first, then oil stick honed them into borders and directional forms. The Polaroids came later. They gave each painting a place, Austria, Miami.
The first performance happened in my backyard, with my cat Tommy as an unexpected dance partner. Then I knew the work needed to go back to Austria. I performed with the painting in the house where I grew up, where I hadn’t set foot in two years, the garden overgrown, the house falling apart. Later I carried it up Hafelekar, 7,657 feet above Innsbruck, too windy to hang, so I draped it over a bench instead. A bird joined me.
The paint has since peeled from every fold and every trip. I read that as a parallel to memory itself, how a place fades, how belonging erodes even when you keep returning to it. On my last trip home, I was told I am now an Auslandsösterreicherin, an Austrian living abroad, no longer fully Austrian, gone too long. The land has washed off my skin the same way the paint lifts from the tarp. Photo credit: Zaire Aranguren / Rheo Creative photography from the Florida Prize installation
Der Grund auf dem ich stehe is currently on view as part of the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art at the Orlando Museum of Art, running May 30 through August 23, 2026 — an annual exhibition recognizing Florida-based artists working at the forefront of contemporary practice. The installation brings the series together as intended: five tarp paintings, one per wall, each paired with its own integrated video component, so that the paintings and the footage of their travels — the backyard, the mountaintop, the childhood home — inhabit the same room. Paint that had already begun peeling from the tarps by the time of installation became part of the work itself rather than a conservation problem to hide; the exposed, worn passages sit visibly beneath the video monitors, letting the erosion of material stand in for the erosion the work is actually about. Seeing the five pieces together, for the first time in one space, made the piece’s real subject legible in a way no single painting could on its own: not a place, but the difficulty of ever fully standing on one again.
Der Grund auf dem ich stehe series, 2025-2026
Acrylic paint, oil stick, and Polaroid transfer on tarp, video with sound on TV
96 × 120 in. (5 panels)
Installation view, Orlando Museum of Art