Alexandra Kontriner

In her exhibition at galeriekrems, Alexandra Kontriner utilizes artistic means to trace the processes of ecological change in her surrounding environment. By loosely combining several series in sequence, she portrays the destruction of a natural area in East Tyrol, drawing a connection to the gradual reconstruction of a damaged ecosystem in Vienna.

The starting point is the three-part work The Forest. For this work, Kontriner was awarded the Erich Grabner Prize for graphic art from the city of Krems in 2024. This series focuses on her family’s forest, which was destroyed by gusting winds. The artist combines black and white watercolors—occasionally large-format—depicting devastated landscapes such as uprooted forests and wastelands with renderings of pioneer plants. Kontriner collects and dries the latter and then creates delicate and highly detailed drawings of them on homemade paper in watercolor and pencil. An example here is the Schmalblättrige Weidenröschen or so-called Trümmerblume (“rubble flowers”), both names for Fireweed, which today spreads across the windswept areas of forests, reducing erosion there like it did on urban areas of rubble after the Second World War.

The exhibition also features the series Pericularium (2018/2019): portraits of twenty-eight insects and a scorpion, which are considered extinct or highly endangered in Austria, and thus serve as examples of species extinction. Using a fine brush and pencil, Kontriner portrays the animals individually from nature on A5 paper. The otherwise blank paper alludes to a future in which the richness and diversity of nature can perhaps only be admired in museums.

Alexandra Kontriner, born 1980 in Lienz/Tyrol, lives and works in Vienna. She graduated from the HTL for glass, arts and crafts and design in Kramsach/Tyrol, then studied art history in Innsbruck and was a guest student at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She has been working as an artist since 2015 and exhibits internationally (including 2024 Galerie Planète Rouge Paris, FR; Künstlerhaus Wien; /SAC Bucharest, RO; Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck; 2023 Ricco/Maresca Gallery, NY; 2021 Taxispalais Kunsthalle Tirol; 2020 Museo Alto Garda, Riva del Garda, IT). Kontriner has received several awards, including the Förderpreis für zeitgenössische Kunst des Landes Tirol (2022), the Förderpreis des RLB Kunstpreises, Innsbruck (2020), and the Prize of the Province of Lower Austria at the 36th Biennale Venice (2019).