Martin Ebner

There is a Chinese painting style and theory which organises the image in three plains; the foreground, the central plain and the background. The background in these paintings is mostly occupied by mountains, individualised and speaking, depicted as the main carrier of emotion and feelings between the people. In the foreground you sometimes see people, sometimes acting but very often, tiny figures as which they are depicted, gazing at the mountains, their backs turned towards us. In between these different plains are voids, huge empty spaces that are supposed to make up for at least eighty percent of the surface. These white areas sometimes evolve from painted clouds into which they are also dispersed.

The voids fill with projections, artifacts of movement, produced by the mind in images it discards as improbable or recognises as possible doublings of forms. They move in themselves, hardly memorable otherwise than in a feeling, a glimpse caught for a moment.

Academic as rules of painting tend to be they offer a place for undecidedness and retreat, shifting responsibility to an accurate following. The projections are unruly, though, but hard to grasp.

Ariane Müller and Martin Ebner are two Austrian artists living in Berlin. Besides of their individual art practice they are publishers (together with Henrik Olesen and Nikola Dietrich) of the Berlin based art magazine Starship.

Ariane Müller mostly works in serial, narrative painting and drawing, and is also a writer having published her first novel in the frame of an exhibition at Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel. She has shown at Kunstverein Nürnberg, Migros Museum Zürich, Mumok Vienna, Havana Biennial, and will have a solo exhibition at Secession Vienna in 2025.

Martin Ebner often works with video and sound, having founded two collaborative sound projects: Zigaretten Rauchen, and Recycling Plastic Inevitable. Currently he exhibits at Rosenblut Friedmann Gallery in Madrid. His works have been shown at ICA London, Gallery Dalston, Tokyo, and CAC Vilnius, among others.

In connection with the magazine Starship they have been conceiving and curating a number of exhibitions in various constellations, one 2012 at CCA Tbilisi, most recently a group show at Swallow in Vilnius with the title The Weather in Fred Sandback.