Artist Eva Schlegel: Breaking Perception

Why It Matters

Schlegel’s work reframes visual literacy and spatial experience for contemporary art and design, challenging viewers and institutions to reconsider how meaning is constructed from partial information. Her methods—combining analogue processes, architecture and text—offer influential strategies for artists and curators exploring perception, memory and immersive installation.

Summary

Austrian artist Eva Schlegel describes her practice of destabilizing perception through photographic and installation work that blurs the boundary between image and text, material and space. Raised drawing in solitude, she turned from painting to experimental darkroom photography and architectural models to create liminal, indeterminate spaces that prompt viewers to question how they see and read. Schlegel traces her shift to text-based, blurred panels and large-scale glass works to a quest for reduced information and heightened attention, noting both fascination and resistance from audiences. She also recounts a personal encounter with the 2004 tsunami that later informed a project using sanding and water to evoke destructive natural forces and memory.

Original Description

“Whatever you understand immediately doesn’t interest you anymore.”

Born in Austria, in 1960, Eva Schlegel works across photography, sculpture, installation, and architectural interventions. Throughout her career, she has explored the relationship between objects and perception, investigating how images, materials, and space shape our understanding of the world. Often working with transparency, reflection, and light, Schlegel creates works that challenge familiar ways of seeing and invite viewers to engage with uncertainty.

“When the viewers are in my work, I would love them to experience where they are. I would want to make them curious and ask questions. This is my main thing because I'm asking myself questions and I really want them to question what they see, to question themselves, to be curious.”

In this conversation, Schlegel reflects on curiosity, uncertainty, and perception as central aspects of her artistic practice. Rather than offering fixed interpretations, her works encourage viewers to question what they see and become aware of their own position in space.

Eva Schlegel studied art in Vienna at the University of Applied Arts. From 1997 to 2006, she held a professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. In 2011, she served as Commissioner of the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale (1988 and 1995), the Sydney Biennial (1992), the São Paulo Biennial (1996), the Kwangju Biennale (1995), and the Moscow Biennale (2005). Major solo exhibitions have been presented at institutions including the Albertina, Vienna; the Museum of Modern Art, Seoul; the Belvedere Museum, Vienna; and the Museum der Moderne Salzburg. Her works are represented in public and private collections worldwide, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MAMM, Moscow; the MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna; and the Museum of Modern Art Foundation, Vienna.

Eva Schlegel was interviewed by Nanna Dahm in Copenhagen in February 2026. The conversation took place at Galleri Bo Bjerggaard.

Camera: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan

Edited by: Nanna Dahm

Produced by: Nanna Dahm

Music via Upright:

Another Bad Start by Thomas Toccafondi

Drifting Downward by Michael David McGuill

Liquid Dream by Tom Hillock and Ellen June

Warm Shivers by Kezia Tomsett and Benjamin McAvoy

Too Far To Go Back by Giacomo Antonio Trivelli and Matthew Leigh Sibley

Works: © Eva Schlegel. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of the Artist.

Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2026.

Louisiana Channel is supported by Den A.P. Møllerske Støttefond.

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