Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman, after many projects realized together with Walter Pichler, is proud now to present in Innsbruck the exhibition Schmetterling Gebäude und Frau aus Metall (Butterfly Building and Woman in Metal), which comprises five autonomous sculptures, the artist's earliest figurative sculpture Kleine Figur (1960), the two plaster sculptures Schmetterling (1962) and Gebäude (1963, both shown at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg in 2016), and the sculpture Alte Figur (1960–63).

All four of these works were created at his Vienna studio. The sculpture Frau aus Metall (1990), on the other hand, was made already in St. Martin and originally was destined for the vestibule of the Türmchen (little tower) for the women. As often with his sculptures, Pichler in drawing developed various versions of them and their housing and here finally decided on the free positioning of Frau in Metall. The sculptures are accompanied by groups of drawings that show Pichler's drawing imagery in its highly differentiated variety over the decades. They testify to the artist's unceasing artistic ambition to break routines, and continuously to start anew and differently, to draw thoughts, and to think through drawing.

With his radical and utopian architectural and artistic designs, Walter Pichler became one of the most idiosyncratic artist personalities of his time. Early groups of works, like the iconic Prototypen, the first free sculptures, as presented in the exhibition, and the sculptures inside their individual buildings in St. Martin, created from the nineteen-seventies onwards, as well as the realized or projected buildings from the middle of the nineties, cement his influence to this day.