In sync with the blooming spring, Austria’s largest contemporary art fair continued to be the central platform for current and emerging voices in the art world. With around 90 solo installations, the fourth edition of SPARK Art Fair Vienna once again focused on its globally unique concept – equal exhibition space for all participating artists, ensuring a democratic approach to contemporary art.
SPARK prides itself on its globally unique exhibition layout, inspired by the steel construction of the historic Marx Halle. The Fair focuses on solo installations and does so by providing equally-sized booths, promoting a democratic approach that ensures equal exhibition space for all the artists. Just like that, the visitors can focus and engage with the individual artists within a communal, heterogeneous environment. The experienced curatorial team – Walter Seidl (Vienna), Jan Gustav Fiedler (Berlin/Vienna), Christoph Doswald (Zurich), and Marina Fokidis (Athens) – worked together with the galleries to select and curate the best fair possible.
Rounding off the intense exhibition days that took place between March 21 and 23, 2025, SPARK also addressed the art world’s most pressing topics through a series of panel discussions open to the public, touching upon current social developments and the growing role of artificial intelligence in the art world.
Just like the curators invited the galleries from around the world to showcase a variety of artists’ perspectives in Vienna to represent the broad spectrum of contemporary art, Contemporary Lynx has prepared an exclusive selection of artists presented at the SPARK 2025. Both established and emerging ones – all equally worth recognition.
Contemporary Lynx is a proud media partner of SPARK Art Fair Vienna 2025.
Selma Selman
Selma Selman works both as an activist and as an artist. Born in 1991 into a Roma community in Bihać, Bosnia, she is heavily inspired by her upbringing and both her family and her personal experiences when creating. “To collaborate with my family is the powerhouse of my practice”, she states, from brainstorming with her dad and recounting stories with her mom or speaking to women in her hometown. Her family’s background in collecting and recycling scrap metal is deeply influential to her practice, as Selma uses metal elements, broken computers, cars, and industrial materials, seeing potential in any undervalued object. Through the materials she uses, she references her personal history, labour, and education, along with the issues of child marriage and women’s role in Roma communities, actively challenging and critiquing stereotypes and oppressive systems. Selman passionately and actively works towards breaking down prejudices that keep pushing down her community.
“Regardless of how private the subject of my work is, I make it universal, so it does not only speak about me, but about us”, Selman states. At SPARK Art Vienna, she presented a new video version of her powerful performance, You Have No Idea (2016), a piece that operates on the line between vulnerability and power. At the Fair, she was represented by the acb Galéria, a space founded in Budapest in 2003 – a highly active gem in the Hungarian art scene, representing both well-established and emerging artists.
Natasza Niedziółka
Natasza Niedziółka, an artist born in Poland, now working and living in Berlin, creates her intricate, vibrating works on canvas using coloured pens, drawing irregular lines between which she traces even finer lines of embroidery thread and vintage silk, with minimal variations to the lines. The nuances of the colour hues bring a rhythm to the canvas, which merges with the shapes and textures and creates a visual unity. The minimal gestures of stitching gain monumental power when presented at such a scale and in these colour fields of repetition.
For Niedziółka, these works, created over many months, are about time in space – visualising her time and effort in the precise intricacies, she notes that the dedication to something, allowing it and letting it go, is visible and creates very personal, intimate work. Her process of stitching functions as an event which is also carried onto the final piece: it goes beyond being an object and becomes an occurrence that is activated time and time again, at each glance of the viewer.
At SPARK, the artist was represented by the Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, operating under the maxim “art must stand the test of time, be transnational while continually changing in structure, and include intellectual dimensions without which it would not be conceivable in the first place”.
Lia Perjovschi
Growing up during the regime of dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, Lia Perjovschi’s practice was naturally influenced by the established socialist regime. Creating intimate artistic experiments using her own body as a medium was Perjovschi’s way of dealing with political censorship, as well as material scarcities. She spent her earliest days mounting performances and exhibitions in her apartment, in the university or throughout the city. After the 1989 Romanian revolution, she observed a post-communist society in motion, progressively being shaped by global capitalism. She then began expanding her practice through recording, structuring, and archiving information – a methodology which helps her confront a radically changing world.
This dynamic evolution within her practice, Perjovschi describes as a “journey from the physical body to the universal body of knowledge”. She is the founder of CAA / CAA (Contemporary Art Archive and Centre for Art Analysis), an organic work-in-progress project, and KM (Knowledge Museum), an interdisciplinary research project she started in 1999. Through her artistic practice, which comprises various media – performance, assemblage, drawing and text, and extending to site-specific installations of objects, facts, diagrams, mind maps and timelines – Perjovschi has been recognised as one of the leading performance artists in Romania. In Vienna, she was represented by the Ivan Gallery from Bucharest, a vital force in the Romanian contemporary art market.
Antoni Starczewski
One of the fundamental mandates of Antoni Starczewski’s work was his refusal to separate the visual arts from the applied arts. Born in 1924 in Łódź, Poland, he passed away in 2000, leaving a notable legacy of multi-media and multi-layered pieces. He worked with ceramics, prints, textiles and in situ projects, resulting in a wide variety of techniques, textures, and surfaces. But Starczewski didn’t stop at visual art – exploring the field of music and language as well, he pieced all these together in his own distinct manner. This deliberate choice stems from his belief that art is a realm in which related statements are able to interact with one another through their many forms.
In Vienna, a beautiful selection of prints and a wide range of his ceramics were presented, showing just how precise Starczewski was when translating from one medium and form to another. One of the works was the Narrative Table on Oral Hygiene with Toothpaste, Glasses, Bandages, Porcelain Castings of Apples and Carrots, Starczewski’s most elaborate narrative table, revolving around the topic of oral hygiene, treated by the artists in a tongue-in-cheek manner. The rhythmic rows – like marching columns – forming a harmonious whole could also be understood as the artist’s protest against the totalitarian regime. These were presented by NADAN Gallery – a space immersed in art as a catalyst for thought in Berlin, supporting and representing visionary creators. At SPARK, NADAN won the KWIZDA Award 2025.
Dragoljub Raša Todosijević
Dragoljub Raša Todosijević was a key conceptual artist in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Born in former Yugoslavia in 1945, he recently passed away in December 2024. Todosijević continues to be relevant through his radical political discourse, illustrated by his texts, actions, performances, installations, and paintings. His constant questioning, interventions, critique, and analytical approach were both the method and the purpose of his work.
At SPARK, X VITAMIN, a Belgrade-based gallery invested in exploring innovative interpretations of traditional art mediums and artistic heritage, presented documentation of one of his most performed pieces – Was ist Kunst, Marinela Koželj? (1978), as well as Sign (1971) and Sculpture (1971) – two photographs documenting actions, where we see parts of the artist’s body, emphasising male vulnerability. Raša Todosijević’s actions and performances have always contextualised the body as a political tool and a site of intervention. It becomes object and subject simultaneously, shifting between sign and signifier.
Maciej Pęcak
As an author of many monumental, sacred and sepulchral projects, where he combines fine and applied arts, collaborating with architects, stage designers and conservationists, Maciej Pęcak oscillates between the physicality of matter and its symbolic dimension. He draws inspiration from the world around him, framing his sculptures as a space for conversation between history and modernity, tradition and experiment, conceptual and organic. In Pęcak’s pieces, we witness a single story rich with time, space, and matter. He believes each material has its own character by collaborating and cooperating with them when crafting rather than pushing the materials to surrender to his will. He also sees his practice as a kind of hike, both intellectually and physically, where, through wandering, each interaction with the work becomes a moment that opens new perspectives.
A Kraków-based UFO Art Gallery, which presents works with a focus on performance, happenings, and expressionism, describes Pęcak as “a painter and sculptor in one with an innate imagination and sense of aesthetics, who makes his works full of themes, symbols and fantasies“.
Georgia Sagri
Working between Athens and New York, Georgia Sagri is actively involved in political movements, manifesting in her work. She presents intense yet often humorous explorations of the human body from its standpoint within contemporary capitalist society and the culture it mediates. Using a vast array of media, she questions our social habits, power structures, and how identity is constructed. Through her performances, she often subverts behavioural patterns and urges us to reconsider our belief systems. Sagri pushes the limits of her physical endurance, usually by repetitive motions, like twitching, screaming, and crying. Her jarring facial expressions further enhance the exhaustion these movements bring, as she explores the bodily manifestation of politics, questions of autonomy and self-organisation.
Georgia Sagri was presented by The Breeder, a gallery working out of the need for building an artistic dialogue between Athens and the world, and showing sometimes political and sometimes radical pieces. Sagri’s research is the exploration of performance art as an ever- evolving domain within both social and visual life was showcased through a selection of pencil drawings (2008–2012) taken directly from the artist’s notebooks, alongside two sculptures from the Working the No Work (Travailler Je ne travaille pas) series, previously presented at the 76th Whitney Biennial. Also on display was the Fresh Bruise print (2018), exhibited originally at Kunsthalle Basel in 2020.
Mariola Przyjemska
Mariola Przyjemska has crafted a multimedia practice, working mainly with painting and photography, and extending to creating videos and objects. Born in 1963 in Warsaw, from the beginning, she has been commenting on the economic, social, and political transformation in Poland since the mid-1980s while closely observing the reality of Polish post-communism and its transformation, often criticising the capitalist system that followed. She was one of the first artists to address themes of consumption, image creation, and methods of building demand for luxury goods or brands. She often creates her photographs and objects in series, through which she discovers a whole range of metaphors and symbols, meanings and associations.
At SPARK, a Warsaw-based Ewa Opałka Gallery displayed a unique and cohesive overview of the development of Przyjemska’s artistic practice. Starting from her large-format paintings from the early 90s, based in abstraction and architecture, through her neo-pop paintings exploring consumerism in the post-transformation Eastern Bloc (1990s and 2000s), and her well-recognised large-format laminated photographs, framing clothing labels as emblems of late capitalism.
Jože Barši
Jože Barši has a degree in both architecture and sculpture, with his practice visibly influenced but not defined by these fields. His practice ranges from deconstructed sculptural objects to architectural explorations of space, site-specific installations, walks, and even sound and conversation-based works, where he explores radio broadcasting as an exhibition space.
With the help of P74 Gallery, an institution in Ljubljana holding space for practitioners who make room for their ideas as well as for the ideas of others, Barši transformed the booth at SPARK into the interior of a kiosk – stacking long-collected newspapers high on stools and the wall. It all stems from newspapers he published at his exhibitions titled Klara Klausberger (1993). The iconic front page of the Zero issue states, “I like newspapers and I don’t know what to do with catalogues”, which also easily leads us into his artistic process. In these times of increasingly digitised media, he pushes the physicality of the newspaper and is still engrossed with newsprint and its design as a carrier of knowledge.
Marcin Jasik
Marcin Jasik, an artist from Warsaw, addresses fundamental questions about the nature of human existence by materialising his search for balance between the material and spiritual world. He creates abstract paintings, bringing a sense of lightness and open spatiality through his effortless, yet precise, gestures. Jasik approaches his canvases with restraint, using colour sparingly, as a veil that obscures even as it reveals. He works in an inner state of meditation that reduces his presence on the canvas to a light whisper, pursuing the essence behind what we see but truly feel.
His inspiration comes from the Legend of St. Francis fresco by Giotto di Bondone, in which St Francis renounces his earthly possessions. Jasik reinterprets the basic lines from this piece, creating a visual dialogue through the horizontal line between the secular (earth) and the sacred (heaven), in an attempt to capture the saint’s gesture. He invites the viewer to experience his art on a visceral level, rather than taking a logical approach.
At SPARK, Jasik’s work was presented by Persons Project, a contemporary art gallery located in Berlin Kreuzberg, centred on an artistic approach that is synchronously conceptual and with the photographic process as a tool for thinking. They describe Jasik as “a rare example of a young artist devoted to his practice, working not from mainstream trends but from his own island of thought”.
Gregor Schneider
Famous for his rooms, Gregor Schneider’s interest lies in those which are in the process of disappearing by taking specific places as the subject of his work. Schneider works through “doubling” existing places (rooms). In that way, they lose their familiarity – they hold a sense of abandonment, and any orientation to a place outside them in question has been lost in the process. His rooms carry a societal and historical power, through which he questions the remaining presence of things past.
Schneider’s works are also heavily inspired by his environment – questions of the destruction of towns and landscapes, especially due to open-cast mining, and what remains after their disappearance. Moving from explorations of simultaneously abandoned and inescapable rooms to capturing the post-apocalyptic reality of an artificial landscape, a certain dystopia of a disappeared reality. In his most recent work, the artist filmed the landscape that remained after the end of lignite mining and beach umbrellas paired with sun loungers watching a landscape under construction. These works were presented by Konrad Fischer Galerie from Düsseldorf, giving the SPARK audiences a chance to ponder whether this devastation of homes and nature leads to any idea of a “home” being obsolete.
