Guardian and threat, familiar and uncanny, a dog is a creature stationed at the threshold between the known and the unseen. What does it mean to see one in a dream? Could it be premonition or warning?
The artists are connected through hoast, an artist-run space in Vienna: as its founders, as artists who have exhibited there, or whose exhibitions are scheduled for the coming year. The exhibition also reflects hoast’s programmatic approach. Yet when artists curate, it is not necessarily a manifesto-like theme or theoretical construct that brings works together, but rather a feeling or a premonition. An exhibition exists before it has a title.
The works belong to a pictorial tradition in which human and animal pass into one another and the anthropomorphic becomes object. The scenes give philosophical concepts a visual form and unsettle the familiar through unexpected encounters.