2026

Oil paint, hair, dust,
painter’s tape, glass, paper

basis wien

2024

Ink and
photo transfer
on Japanese
archival paper

 

2023

Oil paint and wooden dots
on canvas

gehen

2026

Ongoing project
Vienna and elsewhere

Most of these photographs are made while walking. Photographing allows me to pause within that movement. It is an attempt to hold on to something—an arrangement, a distance, a passing relation—while knowing that it is already disappearing. I am less interested in spectacle than in quiet attention—and in what a patient, unobtrusive lens can register. I think through series, sequences and narratives rather than isolated images. Developing the film, scanning the negatives and making prints are part of the same process: repeated ways of returning to the image and reconsidering what I encountered.

Waiting Room

2023

 Installation with paintings,
 drawings and sculptural elements
 HFBK Hamburg 

I am interested in structures and processes. A painting—or its canvas—can be understood as its own economy and/or institution. Within this line of thought, I ask how a painting functions and under what conditions it emerges.

Aby Warburg’s unfinished image panels for the Mnemosyne Atlas form one point of reference: the interstice as a site of transformation, reconsideration, questioning and examination. The three large-scale canvases, each measuring 170 × 140 cm, share the format of Warburg’s image panels. They refer to them while retaining their own identity as paintings.

Donna Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledge” provides another point of reference. In contrast to the Western assumption that research and knowledge can be objective, situated knowledge insists that every form of knowledge is shaped by historical and cultural conditions.

I collect and pack my research, interests and references. A moving box can be a temporary shelter for an object: a means of transporting something from point A to point B, storing it, archiving it. It is a space within a space—an interstice. A waiting room likewise implies an interstice. The interstice is not a second-class space. It defines itself in the present and creates new connections.

untitled (Das Flächenstück)

2022

 Site-specific installation
 Wall painting, paintings,
 text fragments and light 

Das Flächenstück takes Honoré de Balzac’s novella The Unknown Masterpiece and Georges Didi-Huberman’s reading of it as points of departure. A painted wall becomes both support and image. Small paintings, reproduced fragments and coloured light interrupt its gridded surface. The work approaches the surface not as a boundary, but as a site where images emerge, become illegible and dissolve.

Works on Paper

2022

 Watercolour, ink and
 coloured pencil on paper 

 Oil paint, pencil and found image
 on printer paper, 2022 

Work on paper by Leon Keller
Work on paper by Leon Keller
Work on paper by Leon Keller
Work on paper by Leon Keller
Work on paper by Leon Keller
Work on paper by Leon Keller

working title (Eine Figur namens Du)

2026

Submerged plants beneath the surface of water

 Essay film
 HD video, colour, sound
 17 min.
 Work in progress 

Eine Figur namens Du is an essay film set over the course of an evening and night in a Vienna apartment. Moving between windows, thresholds, stairwells, skin, water, fabric and fragments of transit, the film approaches mourning through repetition rather than linear narrative. The recent death of a grandmother and the earlier death of a father form an absent centre. A discontinuous voice-over draws on family memory, inherited phrases, photographs, names and gaps, while separately recorded field sounds create a second montage. Image, voice and sound do not illustrate one another; they meet provisionally, allowing memory to appear as projection, interruption and unresolved relation. 

 Concept, text, camera, sound and editing: Leon Keller
 Vienna, 2026 

Information

Leon Keller (1994*) is an artist based in Vienna.

He studied at HFBK Hamburg with Jutta Koether and Hanne Loreck and works as an art and design teacher.

Selected exhibitions

2024   Kunstverein Zink Jahresgaben Lottery, Vienna
2023   Waiting Room, Graduate Show, HFBK Hamburg
2022   Artist Statement, Parallel Vienna, Vienna
2021   Magazine, Kunstverein in Hamburg
2021   Graduate Show, HFBK Hamburg
2020   Hermes Hemmnis, Grindelallee129, Hamburg
2020   a closed dog, an open blanket, Golden Pudel Club, Hamburg

Selected links
basis wien — archive entry 1
basis wien — archive entry 2
basis wien — archive entry 3
HFBK Hamburg — Graduate Show 2023
Hamburger Kunsthalle — GROUP CRIT IV & V
Haus am Waldsee — How to move and respond

Writing
Disclaim Magazine
nerven
Torial

Contact
leon.keller.privat@proton.me
Instagram — @halloichbinsleon