Experience Beaux Mendes's Vision: A Captivating Exhibition of Abstract Art in Vienna

This exhibition showcases the work of Los Angeles-based artist Beaux Mendes, who explores painting as a 'transient medium.' The densely layered abstract compositions feature emerging and vanishing figuration, seeking to uncover the unseen and challenge traditional representation. The exhibition includes new works created in Vienna, alongside sculptures and figurative paintings.

Beaux Mendes approaches painting as a 'transient medium' – a process of transition and becoming on uncertain ground. In their densely layered abstract compositions, figuration flickers between emergence and withdrawal, condensation and erasure, seeking a fluid, provisional, and resistant state. Mendes's work takes its time, resisting traditional representation to uncover the invisible, highlighting that an image can never be fully perceived or grasped. The choice of supports—whether linen, wood, parchment, or panels—is crucial; rather than being concealed in service of illusion, the paint layers are repeatedly scraped and wiped away to reveal their inherent texture. This process brings spectral forms to life, underscoring a sense of incompletion. Mendes's works examine and deconstruct European-American traditions of landscape and plein air painting, with the latter often associated with colonial appropriation and aestheticization of 'undiscovered' territories. In contrast, Mendes uses repeated journeys to remote locations, such as the Angeles National Forest in California or Germany's Black Forest and Elbe Valley, for a critical reflection on the ideologies imprinted on landscapes: exploitation, erasure, and painting as a tool of imperial dominance and ethno-nationalism. Through persistent material exploration and embodied research, Mendes's paintings open new spaces for imagination and feeling—spaces that resist closure and enable different ways of seeing and relating to land, memory, and form, thereby reactivating landscape painting as a site of transformative potential. The exhibition at Secession primarily features new works, some created during a residency in Vienna, showcasing diverse facets of the artist's oeuvre, including recent sculptures and explicit figurative paintings.

Information regarding tickets for the exhibition can be found via the provided link to the Secession's ticketing portal. General museum opening hours are Tuesday to Sunday, 10 AM to 6 PM, with the museum being closed on Mondays. Further visitor information is available on the website.