Future of Melancholia

Philipp Timischl: Molded, Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade

8.3.–4.5.2025

Philipp Timischl is one of Austria’s most significant emerging artists, advancing a distinctive practice that engages a wide range of media and materials. In transformations of topical images, Timischl processes personal and critical reactions to the impressions and challenges of an everyday life increasingly shaped by forms of populism and a lack of orientation. The artist has created his most recent cycle of works as a new production for the exhibition series Future of Melancholia. For Molded, Timischl created nine paintings that intentionally break with stylistic consistency, deliberately playing with artistic authorship. The exhibition title, Molded, which can mean both ​“formed” and ​“decayed,” reflects a shifting focus within the artist’s serial production process. Each painting in the series adopts a distinct visual style: one is text-based, another incorporates a collaged SKIMS advertising poster, while another features a gray, concrete-like texture, and a further oil painting shows a cloudy sky.

This intentional stylistic variety also has a number of unifying elements. The format of the works in Molded is identical, and they all have elaborate trims, so-called mouloura, which gives the series the look of a construction set for wall coverings and recalls typically French interior design. These decorative frames and paneling, inspired by traditional craftsmanship but industrially produced, are attached to the lower sections of the canvases as a recurring sculptural element. Instead of a clearly identifiable artistic signature, the works are unified by their external structure, which in turn raises questions about authorship, identity, and artistic ownership. Timischl deliberately challenges the notion of artistic authorship and originality, echoing strategies from 1960s minimal and conceptual art, by purchasing and using an industrial product, but then nonetheless signing his works as personal designs, even if they are made in such a way to make it impossible to exhaustively determine their authorship.

In addition to the Molded series, Timischl is also showing the two works Monochrome Siblings (2024). On the lower quarter of canvases made of tadelakt the artist has attached LED panels that play directly with the painting and with the idea of twins alluded to in the video. At first, the lower LED strip simply mirrors the colors of the canvas, creating the illusion of subtle motion. Soon, however, various pop-cultural and historical pairs appear, including the cartoon characters Chip n’ Dale, Hans Holbein’s the Younger’s ambassadors from his painting of the same name (The Ambassadors, 1533), Chucky, the murdering doll and his bride Tiffany, as well as Snoop Dogg und Martha Stewart.

Here Timischl again draws on (pop-)cultural appropriation, this time more directly, but now the texts that he adds to the famous couples he depicts in the video are even more important. Sentences like ​“we’ve always been by each other’s side” and ​“you are me and I am you” very much suggest the identification of the self with the other. This is in particular all about the relationship of the two works Monochrome Siblings to each other, as they were made based on one idea and they literally always ​“hang out” with each other. Plagiarism is another theme, as the two paintings essentially duplicate each other: ​“How to tastefully plagiarize myself.” While Timischl’s appropriation is humorous, an underlying sense of melancholy remains.

What in particular matters here is the allusion to the concept of the future, or rather its cancellation (drawing on Mark Fisher) that Timischl refers to in his solo show within the project The Future of Melancholia. Here too, the definitions of the title Molded are significant, asking as to form and its transformation that includes its transience. Inherent to Timischl’s works is what is often called the uncanny, with clear discomfort not only concerning a present-day increasingly tempered by melancholy but also the future.

Timischl’s series reflects Mark Fisher’s ​“slow cancellation of the future” (2013), which builds on Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology — the idea that cultural elements from the past persist like ghosts, continuously reappearing in the present. Fisher argues that modernity’s goal-driven understanding of time has collapsed into an endless loop of recycled cultural and social forms, making true innovation seem impossible. In stylistic terms too, Timischl works with this point of reference, by drawing on different styles and epochs and generating a form of temporal ambiguity, thus not merely engendering a sense of disorientation but also playing a game of chance with the ideas of authorship mentioned above. In particular his text-based painting on the dubious obligation to go to school witnesses the insecurity of our time, anticipating not just The Future of Melancholia but a melancholic future in which stability and continuity oscillate as seemingly unattainable goals.

Timischl’s intricate classical designs and the unified dimensions of these works set them into dialogue with one another, while evoking memories of industrial precision as well as a nostalgic look back at mechanical prints and the past in itself, whose borders to the present are blurred. Molded draws on pop-cultural symbols from the past, creating a visual language that embodies the melancholic idea of a ​“cancelled future.” Timischl’s series invites viewers into a fragmented world — his artefacts mirror a moment that swings between tradition and the contemporary, whereby the contemporary may already be the past.

This project is held under the auspices of the initiative Imagine Dignity – Laboratories Of Hope: Regenerating Democratic Prosperity by the Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs/​Section V – International Cultural Affairs, and with particular support from the Culture Department of the Federal State of Styria, with their focus on the southeast European region. The exhibition itself was initiated by Sandro Droschl, director of HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, with planning then undertaken in close cooperation with Marijana Kolarić, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, and its curator and coordinating project manager Miroslav Karić. As a whole, the project aims to promote deeper exchange and cultural understanding between Serbia, Austria, and Styria within the context of a shared European space, providing dialogic insight into current activities in art in these neighboring countries.

The implementation of the project would not have been possible without the generous support of the Styrian State Government, Department 9, Culture, Europe, Sport, the Austrian Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs, the Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport, the Culture Department of the City of Graz, the Museum for Contemporary Art Belgrade, the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and the Ministry for Culture of the Republic of Serbia.

Future of Melancholia
Further exhibition venues:

Future of Melancholia
8.3. – 4.5.2025
Gallery-Legacy of Milica Zorić & Rodoljub Čolaković
Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade (MoCAB)
Rodoljuba Čolakovića 2, 11000 Belgrade

Future of Melancholia
21.3. – 8.6.2025
HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark (HK Styria)
Burgring 2, 8010 Graz