WOLF + ORNAUER: Entangled Matter

With Entangled Matter, SUPPAN Gallery presents for the first time the collaborative works of Michael Ornauer and Clemens Wolf. This collaboration is not to be understood as a methodological cooperation between two subjects, but rather as an ontological condition. The works shown here emerge from a process in which authorship, material, and action cannot be separated. They are works in which painting appears not as a completed image, but as a processual constellation—as a site where material, gesture, and object enter into a reciprocal relationship. The work does not appear as the result of a linear act of production, but as a temporary condensation of relational forces. In this context, painting becomes an open system. Color, support, and intervening materials do not form a hierarchical order, but rather a structure of mutual dependencies. Every placement is simultaneously a reaction; every gesture a response to what is already present. The pictorial space does not organize itself around a center, but as a field of continuous negotiation in which form always remains provisional.

The concept of Entangled Matter refers to a materiality that does not function as a passive bearer of meaning, but as an active agent within the process. Matter acts, resists, guides, and modifies decisions. From this perspective, the focus shifts from intentional expression toward a practice of co-becoming, in which human and non human elements are equally involved in the act of coming into being. 

The collaborative works can thus be read as visual manifestations of processual thinking: as states rather than objects; as relations rather than representations. Meaning here does not arise through fixation, but through entanglement. The image is not a conclusion, but an event in flux—a site in which time, action, and matter mutually produce one another.

Entangled Matter thus opens up a space of experience in which painting becomes visible as a relational practice: not as the expression of individual autonomy, but as a shared becoming in the in-between.