BOOK:Evelyn Plaschg-Viscous City, Revolver Publishing
Evelyn Plaschg’s catalogue “Viscous City”, published by Revolver Publishing in conjunction with her exhibition at HALLE FÜR KUNST, is less a traditional exhibition catalogue than an extension of the artist’s spatial and painterly thinking. The publication captures the immersive logic of Plaschg’s practice, where painting exceeds the frame and enters into dialogue with architecture, urban theory, and contemporary visual culture. Rather than documenting the exhibition from a neutral distance, the book mirrors the density and rhythmic sequencing that define the installation itself.
At the center of the publication is Plaschg’s conception of the city as a “viscous” organism—thick, fluid, and alive. Drawing implicitly on the sociological writings of Georg Simmel, the artist approaches urban life not as a rigid system of infrastructure but as a pulsating environment shaped by proximity, friction, and continuous interaction. The city becomes a living body in which architecture, movement, and subjectivity intermingle. This conceptual framework gives the book a strong intellectual foundation without allowing theory to overwhelm the visual experience.
The publication’s greatest strength lies in the way it reproduces the relational nature of Plaschg’s paintings. Her works are rarely isolated images; instead, they function as interconnected fragments that gain meaning through repetition and adjacency. Installed edge-to-edge in the exhibition, the paintings resemble cinematic strips or digital image feeds, and the book successfully translates this sensibility onto the page. Motifs recur across spreads, colors echo from one composition to another, and the reader experiences the publication almost sequentially, as though navigating an urban landscape in motion.
Plaschg’s paintings themselves remain compelling for their tension between intimacy and estrangement. Figures and spaces appear suspended between physical and digital realities, evoking the overstimulated condition of contemporary metropolitan life. The imagery is seductive yet unstable, resisting fixed interpretation. This ambiguity gives the publication a lingering psychological intensity that distinguishes it from many contemporary art catalogues.
As both documentation and autonomous object, Viscous City demonstrates how the exhibition catalogue can operate as a critical extension of artistic practice. The publication succeeds not only in presenting Evelyn Plaschg’s work, but in recreating the sensory and conceptual atmosphere that animates it. For readers interested in contemporary painting, urban aesthetics, and the transformation of image culture, it is a sophisticated and rewarding volume. -Dimitris Lempesis
