Toni Schmale
Toni Schmale was born in Hamburg in 1980. She started out as a professional football player and played in the German regional league, the Bundesliga and the national team from 1994 until 2002. After her career as a professional athlete ended, she enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig, where she studied media art and graduated in 2009. From 2009 until 2012, she studied performance art with Carola Dertnig and performance sculpture with Monica Bonvicini at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where she graduated in 2013. Among other awards, Toni Schmale received the Birgit Jürgenssen Prize in 2011, the Prize of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 2013, and the Otto Mauer Prize in 2017, which gave rise to a solo show at the Vienna Secession. Also in 2017, she received the BALTIC Artists' Award, and her works were shown at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead (UK). Other international solo and group exhibitions include the Salzburger Kunstverein (2013), the Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2014), the Kyiv Biennale (2015), and the nGbK – Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst in Berlin (2016). In 2021, Toni Schmale won the KÖR Kunst Vienna Public Art Competition, which culminated in her sculpture TANKE 24/7 being realised in the Stefan-Weber Park in Vienna.
Schlauch #6 [Hose #6]
2023,
Forged steel
Toni Schmale’s sculptures are body-centered, even though the body itself is mostly absent. Instead of soft materials associated with corporeality, she works with steel and concrete, assembling them into sensuous, heavy «transitional objects.» The artist borrowed this term from psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and applies it to the «in-between» – that moment when something cannot be easily identified as one or the other. In that spirit, her objects oscillate between fetish objects replete with lustful associations and fitness equipment that disciplines the body, inviting the viewer to reflect, for example, on why societies typify not only bodies but also materials according to gender. Schmale subverts these stereotypes in ways that are as subversive as they are humorous. Most recently, she created a dysfunctional gas station in Stefan Weber Park in Vienna: without being bothered by the smell of gasoline, people can meet there, relieve nostalgic feelings, and convince themselves that the automobile has had its day. As part of the Kyiv Biennial, Schlauch #6 [Hose #6] will be shown: a 60-mm-thick steel tube with dents and several loops, which appears again and again in Schmale’s work and, depending on the context, evokes transport of various liquids – be it oil, gasoline, or water. (Christa Benzer)
Augarten Contemporary, hoast, IG Architektur, Laurenz, Neuer Kunstverein Wien, Never At Home, Waffen Franz Kapfer, New Jörg, Ve.Sch
October 17–December 17
Main Exhibition
Curators: Serge Klymko, Hedwig Saxenhuber and Georg Schöllhammer