The rituals of various communities, alternative life plans, nature, and the rural environment are all recurring themes in the artistic works of Iris Andraschek. For her exhibition at the Kunst Haus Wien Gallery and Garage the artist continues her many years of observations and studies of nature and the ways in which we interact with nature. Her archive has been steadily expanding since the late 1990s, incorporating portraits of people from the most far-flung regions of the world. Their common trait is a special way of engaging with gardens, nature, and wilderness.

For Andraschek it is never about clichés or idyllic settings and always about an organic principle of form and thought; never about rigid orders, but about processes and relations. Her works are characterised by the balance that is struck between the documentary and the mythical-poetic. The farms, agricultural warehouses, gardens, fields depicted are transformed into places with a special significance. Nature and plants are also key elements and themes in her drawings.

At the Kunst Haus Wien Gallery and Garage the existing archive of photographs and videos is to be expanded and re-assembled along political lines, in keeping with current developments. Iris Andraschek will also design an installation for the exterior of the Kunst Haus Wien in which a mobile bee hive plays an important role.

Iris Andraschek was born in Horn, Lower Austria, in 1963, and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, complementing her studies with fresco painting at the Scuola degli arti ornamentali in Rome and Bolzano. Work stays abroad in Durham, Ontario (2002), New York (2010), the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, CA (2012), and in Istanbul (2015). She lives and works in Vienna and Mödring (Lower Austria).