Can you introduce yourself to our readers?
I am fundamentally a sculptor and have been working in this field for roughly the past thirty years. Not long ago, a new catalogue of my work titled Modeling Temporality was published. It brings together works that are representative of what I’ve been doing over the last three decades.
I received a very classical education in sculpture. Back then, modeling still meant sculpting actual figures. For example, I had to copy one of the figures from Auguste Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais in clay. That’s where I learned these techniques. After that, I studied at the University of Arts Linz and later completed my diploma at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna under Bruno Gironcoli.
Afterwards, I wrote a cultural studies dissertation dealing with the concept of the nomadic and the circulation of this term. In the 1990s, artists were often charged with a kind of nomadic myth, and I was interested in that. Exactly when my doctoral defense took place, in 2006, I received a federal studio grant in the Wattsgasse. From that point on, I began developing what I now refer to as the overarching theme of my work: modeling concepts of time. Many sub-concepts play a role in this, such as repetition, boredom, friction, reality, and open works. All of these terms are important.
Opposite us, we can see a very significant work titled second life. Could you tell us more about it? How long have you been working on this piece?
This is just one part of a larger project, which I’ve been working on daily since 2011. What you see are black granite panels with sentences engraved on them. Each sentence begins with a date, followed by the phrase “Tomorrow I will …” repeated over and over. On a single panel, there are roughly thirty such sentences—about one month’s worth. That means there are twelve panels per year. Here in the gezwanzig gallery, for the first time, I have displayed several panels together as a single image, representing an entire year. During the exhibition, I will continue to add more sentences.
Usually, only two or three panels hang on the wall, or they’re shown in a more condensed form. The key point of this work also lies in its material: black granite. I’m aware that there’s a cultural awareness surrounding this; people tend to associate it with gravestones or with something from the past. Even though gravestones have looked different for decades, when you see polished black stone, you still think of eternity. Ephemeral sentences are engraved into this material, creating a strong tension.
Every day, I engrave a sentence into the black granite that comes to mind, for example: “Tomorrow I will meet Daniel for the interview.” Some sentences make sense, while others arise purely from imagination. The sentences that I cannot fulfill because they are entirely fictional are then crossed out, and layers of time begin to accumulate. A panel consists of approximately 30 sentences, and there are 12 panels per year.
How did you actually come to this material? I imagine it’s not easy to find something you can work with for so long.
You can only really determine how long you’ve been working on something in retrospect. Only looking back can I say that there has been a shared direction for about twenty years now, something that also becomes visible in the catalogue, or a certain aesthetic, if you will. I couldn’t plan that. But, like many others, as a student, I struggled with the question of how to participate in contemporary discourse and what kind of work could hold its ground. Those artificial constructions never worked. It happened through constant practice and development.
And you sensed that it was right for you at some point?
Over time, it became clear to me that earlier works already contained these ideas. For my diploma project, for example, I spent weeks knitting all across Vienna, creating my work directly within public spaces throughout the city. That was in the mid-1990s. People literally walked into my knitted structures. It was a completely different medium, of course, but this growing mesh was already conceived in terms of time.
Back then, people often referred to it as rhizomatic, following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and post-structuralist. Content-wise, much of what I do now was already there, even if the materials were different. Stone appeared in my work about twenty years ago for the first time. One early piece is titled digitally aged. It is a black granite panel in a 16:9 format. Digital numerals—the kind we normally only see as light information on a clock—are engraved into the stone. But only the zeros. At the time, the first flat screens were appearing in exhibitions. From a distance, this work resembles a screen. Only when you approach it do you realize that the material is stone. That tension interested me.
You have a background in classical stone carving, but for a long time, you weren’t using that knowledge.
Yes, I was trained in it. I really do know how to work with stone. But in the 1990s, that technique was taboo. Professors said that if you wanted to make good art, the first thing you had to do was unlearn what you knew. So I consciously forgot that skill for years, but then, in the end, came back to it. If I say, “I’m a sculptor, and I work with stone,” people immediately imagine monumental figures, heavy forms. That couldn’t be further from my interest. I’m not interested in classical three-dimensionality, in mass occupying space.
Could you elaborate more on how you are working with stone, particularly?
Though these objects are extremely heavy and compact, they require careful handling. If you set them down incorrectly, a corner breaks off, and that could be it. You can’t glue or disguise it. To handle it gently is essential. And of course, a great deal emerges through the act of working itself. When you work with stone, much develops through repetition, experimentation, and time, rather than a finished concept. Because of my background in stone carving, I already know quite precisely what is possible. I never pushed the material to its limits for its own sake. I used it when it was conceptually necessary.
People often talk about your light installation TOMORROW at Mariahilfer Straße 1 in Vienna. Could you tell us how it came into being?
The project was realized in 2017. I couldn’t exactly place a massive stone up there; it wouldn’t have made sense. In cases like this, I respond to the site and work with what is possible there. The original idea was for it to appear as if the architects working below were live-drawing this future concept above their heads. Initially, the piece was animated. Each element could light up gradually: first the vertical construction lines, then the horizontal ones, and finally the circular forms. Only afterward would the outlines of the letters appear with stronger brightness, similar to how technical drawings were once finalized using a thick ink pen. I wanted the word TOMORROW to become readable only after 24 hours, shortly before midnight, and then immediately dissolve again and begin rebuilding itself. The idea was that the future is something you can never fully grasp; it’s always incomplete or collapsing. Later, however, we decided to make the installation permanently illuminated.
The installation is fourteen meters long. When we first tested it at 80% brightness, it now runs at about 40%. The first time we lit it, it felt like a UFO had landed; I can still remember it vividly.
Can you talk about the exhibition ‘At a close distance’ in gezwanzig gallery? Which works are shown?
I’ve already explained the Tomorrow panels—the daily “Tomorrow I will…” sentences. It was important to me to show them in a representative way, to give a sense of continuity. Many of my works function like ongoing construction sites: something I work on daily. The three disk works shown here were developed specifically for space and have never been exhibited before. I actually saw them completed for the first time in the room of the gallery; before that, I’d only seen them in the workshop among machines. All works deal with mediated seeing: lenses, instruments, and the distance between them. One work refers to a telescope, another to a microscope, and another to the ophthalmological instrument used to examine the retina, the interface where images enter the brain.
We discussed the black granite works as a kind of memory medium. In most cases, gravestones bear inscriptions intended to last forever. What is engraved is supposed to be remembered. But I’m not engraving the past—I’m engraving fictional futures. “Tomorrow…” is always a projection. There’s a work of mine titled The Last Image. It references the future September 5th, 2052. I am interested in the view of the future and often the uncertainty, without knowing what will actually happen on that day. This is a star constellation predicted for September 5th, 2052, captured near Moscow.
You mentioned earlier the question of disproportion and proportion; could you elaborate on that?
That sense of disproportion was important to me in this work because it fits quite well into the broader discourse on the Anthropocene. Especially today, where there is this human arrogance, this belief that humanity can somehow “do something” to the planet. In reality, it could very well be that this anthropogenic layer, the layer created by humans, whether radioactive dust, plastic, or other residues, will ultimately constitute only a very thin layer within the earth’s geological strata. A tiny trace. That was something I wanted to make visible here.
If we come back to the notion of time, how would you define your relationship to it?
It’s not about defining what time is. Even physics no longer agrees on that. With space-time, quantum theory, and such, our ordinary understanding of time has become outdated. I’m not trying to answer what time is or predict what will happen in fifty years. I’m interested in repetition, duration, obligation, and how these processes shape experience. Stone already contains time. The medium itself carries it. My work doesn’t illustrate time; it reveals how embedded it is.
What is your process for creating your works?
The process is often very long, and I have to plan it in detail. There’s always a preparation period of weeks, sometimes even months. I regularly create full-scale 1:1 models at home or in the studio. I’ll have templates hanging around privately, revisiting them again and again. There is no room for error; everything is enormously costly, which makes careful planning essential.
That sounds like a very intensive process.
It’s exhausting sometimes („laughs“). I manage to create at most three or four major works per year. And these must feel right to me; they need to withstand my own sensitivities and self-criticism. They also have to engage me mentally—they must have enough strength to stay in my mind for weeks on end.
I used to keep sketchbooks full of ideas, but I always realized that the ideas I actually realized were the ones I hadn’t drawn, because they were strong enough to keep returning on their own.
Let’s talk about the series of works long time recording.
I have been working on this project for about fifteen years. I use white marble from Thassos, Greece. The small cubes, pre-cut with a special machine, represent the hours in a year—approximately 8.736 hours in a non-leap year. Every time I work, I remove a cube. For me, the spots where the cubes have been removed represent a working hour. These ritualized time structures interest me deeply. The panel thus serves as a documentation of my working hours. My work revolves around records and notations. I make art because, for me, it feels more like an obligation.
I wonder whether such obligations, such compulsions, can be translated into art. Not always producing something entirely new (which people tend to expect from artists), but continuing the same form over the years.
That also relates to longevity, both of the works and of you as an artist. Do some works seem to withstand time because I gave them time?
Yes. A friend of mine once said that when you flip through my catalogue, with works spanning thirty years, nothing in it feels dated.
When do you work? How often are you in the studio?
Ideally, I’m there every day, Monday through Sunday. I go there to write a “Tomorrow I will…” sentence, remove cubes for working hours, add marks, and do things in the studio.
Or, for example, the work still alive asks: how many hours do I have left in my life? Of course, that’s unknowable. But I had small plates cut, the size of a credit card, and I carried them with me, marking every hour with a line: still alive. On the back, the total hours accumulate, around 720 per plate. When I would begin a new plate depended on visits to my son. The count continues. The idea was: in my final hour, on my deathbed, I could turn it over and know how many hours I had lived. It would answer the question, though it would no longer matter.
Is repetition something that is exhausting for you?
Completely. I can’t relate at all to people who describe this as “meditative.” It’s not meditative for me. It annoys me. It’s tiring. But you have to do it. That, to me, is the most honest stance: not everything has to be pleasant. Certainly not when it comes to art.
Your studio space reflects that; it feels reduced.
Everything is black and white. I like coolness in art. Elegance can be dangerous; stone is also a material of representation, of power, and status. You have to be careful not to let it become too beautiful. The work needs friction.
Solo exhibition: Arnold Reinthaler – At a close distance
Exhibition duration: 20 November – 23 January 2026
Finissage accompanied by a live performance by Siegfried Zaworka: 23 January 2026, 6 PM (the live performance will start at 7 PM)
Opening times: Wednesday to Friday: 11 AM-6 PM | Saturday: 11 AM-3 PM
Address and contact:
gezwanzig gallery
Gumpendorfer Straße 20, 1060 Vienna, Austria
www.gezwanzig.com
www.instagram.com/gezwanzig/
Arnold Reinthaler – www.reinthaler.org
Born in 1971 in Wels, Austria, Arnold Reinthaler lives and works in Vienna. He studied sculpture at the University of Art and Design Linz and at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (graduating under Bruno Gironcoli). He earned his doctorate with a cultural studies dissertation under Thomas Macho (on the circulation of the term „nomadic“ in the art context). In his work, Reinthaler questions systems of time measurement, focusing on the subjective actions of long-term work processes, primarily translated into stone, paper, and light media. He explores the concept of „temporality“ by, for example, engraving fleeting characters into an almost anachronistic medium like granite or by continuously experimenting with techniques of self-recapitulation to develop models of „timeliness.“
Text by Hanna Hamel on Arnold Reinthaler’s solo exhibition “At a close distance”. Glances are fleeting. They often last only fractions of a second. Arnold Reinthaler’s artistic material, however, granite and marble, has been around for millions of years. Using the technique of engraving, his works explore the tension between the fleeting moment and the stable medium. Reinthaler’s latest works, which are on display in the exhibition, blend views of distant times and places with close-up images. ‘At a close distance’ reveals what normally escapes observation. The juxtaposition of a distant constellation of stars and a microscopic view of tiny body cells reveals astonishing connections—between the near and the far, between microcosm and macrocosm.