Thomas Gänszler

The Viennese artist Thomas Gänszler (*1982) studied art and communicative practice at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna from 2003, and two years later also studied media art, sculpture and new media with Erwin Wurm. Admittedly: That sounds overwhelmingly all-encompassing when you read it. This makes it all the more remarkable how pointedly and precisely Thomas Gänszler incorporates these visual aspects into his art.
Since 2020, the artist has been working on a long-term project entitled Kontinent, which has resulted in various works, installations and exhibitions. To this end, the artist has written an algorithm that randomly generates a topography. The landscape created in this way, which only exists in virtual space, is approximately one square kilometer in size. This continent forms the immaterial source material, so to speak, with which the artist works. He penetrates the digital space in order to extract real, material works from it. He translates (real) objects into (digital) information – and back again: medial and sculptural, analog and digital, plastic and fantastic.
Based on these premises, Thomas Gänszler developed his first expansive installation at Galerie Michael Sturm in 2021, in which he presented pitch-black topographies of the virtual continent on mirrored steles and enriched them pictorially with three-dimensional polygons on a black background. This first act of “creation” was followed in Vienna by an “exploration” of the digital landscape in the form of black and white panoramas, reminiscent on the one hand of historical landscape photographs from the early days of photography and on the other of images from NASA’s planetary space missions. In the third act, the artist floated the virtual landscape of the continent as a monumental block in the stairwell of the Kunstverein Eisenstadt.
In his installation for the Karlsruhe One-Artist-Show, Thomas Gänszler now goes one step further: here he makes changes to the virtual landscape itself; in a kind of media transformation, he brings things from this landscape back into reality (and vice versa); in addition, the viewers are actively involved for the first time. Pars pro toto of this transformative process is a stone, a rock, which Thomas Gänszler captures digitally, shapes sculpturally, lets float above the horizon in the virtual landscape and makes real in a sculptural work that was produced using 3D printing and CNC milling. Viewers are put in a position to move through the virtual landscape with VR glasses – just as if they were exploring the surface of a distant planet from the perspective of a spacecraft.
Thomas Gänszler moves with astonishing aplomb at the interface between the virtual and the real world, so that when encountering his works it is no longer possible to distinguish categorically between the two. In fact, they seem to be different aggregate states of one and the same reality. The associated quality of experience is as convincing as it is irritating. It affects us physically and psychologically. This can be experienced in an impressive way in Thomas Gänszler’s one-artist show.