Ernst Koslitsch at Bildraum 07 with Cosmic Trigger - Respawn in Vienna curated by Katharina Hoffmann

Bildraum 07 presents Cosmic Trigger - Respawn by Ernst Koslitsch, curated by Katharina Hoffmann, through 27 May 2026.

Something about formwork timber: it exists to be temporary. Poured against, removed, discarded. The fact that it carries marks, screw holes, concrete residue, the grain compressed by use, makes it one of the more loaded materials a sculptor could choose.

Ernst Koslitsch has been working with it long enough to understand that the charge is the point. The title borrows its logic from video games: the moment a player character returns after elimination, slightly displaced, undefeated. Koslitsch applies this not as metaphor but as method.

Forms are not completed, they are configured, then reconfigured. The question the exhibition asks is not what survives but what changes each time something comes back.

The works do not resolve. They recirculate, returning in altered constellations until the question of what they mean gives way to the question of how they move.

Bildraum 07 sits at street level in Vienna's seventh district, its facade flush with the sidewalk on Burggasse. The gallery is operated by Bildrecht, Austria's visual artists' rights organization. That institutional context carries weight here. This is a space that exists to protect artists' claims on their work over time.

Koslitsch's practice, in which material changes hands through use and abandonment before arriving in the studio, lands here with a kind of quiet precision.

The most expansive gesture in the exhibition is the wall constellation occupying the first room. Dozens of small wooden fragments, cut and left in the warm yellow-ochre of used formwork, distributed across the white surface in a formation that reads simultaneously as explosion and system.

Individual pieces suggest figures, tools, limbs, glyphs. None of these associations settle. From a distance, the whole field behaves like a notation in an unfamiliar alphabet. Up close, the screw holes and surface wear of former building sites pull the eye back to the material itself.

Three large panels of formwork timber, cut into silhouettes that hold the proportions of figures without resolving into them, occupy the adjoining wall. They are leggy, fractured, almost heraldic.

The cuts are clean, the shapes that remain from those cuts carry the unpredictability of gesture. What the pieces cast against the white surface are shadows that seem to function as a second, flatter set of works.

In a second room, a bank of screens runs footage from a video game. The respawn sequence. A rolling metal table holds smaller sculptures and objects in an arrangement that reads less as display than as accumulation.

The adjacency between the screens and the timber objects does not explain itself, which seems to be the point.

Ernst Koslitsch with his Yellow Universe and the Ideas around Systems of Beliefs

Ernst Koslitsch with his sculpture work “Yellow Universe” and an Interview about Beliefe and creating worlds

Catapult ContemporaryDominique Catherina Foertig

The logic of the game, character returns after elimination, state resets, the story continues, rhymes structurally with the logic of the material: used, discarded, reconfigured, returned to use. Neither medium treats the first configuration as final.

The respawn as cultural logic has migrated far beyond gaming. It describes how forms circulate online, how things get archived and resurface, how disappearance has become less final than provisional. Koslitsch is not particularly interested in nostalgia for the analog. His interest seems to lie in the mechanics of recurrence itself.

The formwork timber was already secondary material before it entered the studio, it had served one purpose and been discarded. What happens in Cosmic Trigger - Respawn is closer to a third life than a second.

One work stayed with me after leaving: a small blue figure on a dark wooden plinth in the corner of the second room, painted a color that had no business being there. It stood with the composure of something that had already survived several configurations and was not particularly concerned about the next one.

Its scale made it easy to miss, but its presence clarified the exhibition’s larger movement. In Koslitsch’s work, survival is not preservation. A form does not come back because it has remained intact. It comes back because it can be cut, displaced, stained, recombined, and still carry force.

By the time one steps back onto Burggasse, the title no longer feels like a borrowed gaming term. Respawn becomes a sculptural condition. Nothing here asks to be final.

The fragments, figures, screens, and tables all point toward the same idea: a form does not die when its first use is over. It returns differently, and that difference is where the work begins again.

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Katharina Hoffmann on Instagram
Ernst Koslitsch on Instagram

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