PAINTINGS ARE EGOISTS
Live Performance
Estermann Kunst, Wien
260x180x70cm, silk, surgical steel, powder coating, silk colors, polystirene, tiles, 2026
At the opening of her solo exhibition PAINTINGS ARE EGOISTS at ESTERMANN KUNST in Vienna on 16 September 2026, Iv Toshain presented a live painting performance for the third time in her life, following performances in 2012 and 2020.
The artist threw blades directly at the frame stretched with silk instead of canvas, creating an immediate, eye-to-eye encounter between body, weapon, and surface. Packets of liquid paint concealed behind the white silk ruptured on impact, and colour bled through the tender fabric.
The immediacy is central to Toshain’s use of cold weapons. Unlike mediated forms of action, the blade depends on proximity, physical contact and consequence. Its danger is not represented but remains present in the object itself. In this sense, the blade becomes a counterpoint to an increasingly technological and immaterial realty. The blade makes a line. Like the pencil, it is an extension of the hand and draws through contact, but while the pencil inscribes, the blade incises. Its line physically alters the material and is irreversible.
Iv Toshain grew up with a life-size replica of the bust of the greek Venus de Milo. In her performance, she uses hairstyle, costume and physical presence to engage conceptually with the ancient ideal of feminine beauty and the cult of the body. Instead of a sculpture, the classical column bears cold weapons and is made of polystyrene. Antiquity and the academic tradition of painting form the canon from which she comes. She does not break with it. She tears it to pieces.
Bioth photographs capture unstaged moments during Toshain’s performance in the Battle with Painting: her unconsciously raised hand appears like an oath-taking gesture, then she kneels as if in a gesture of prayer.
Toshain’s Performative Paintings follow the tradition of Viennese Actionism while also referencing Lucio Fontana’s Tagli and Niki de Saint Phalle’s Shooting Paintings—practices in which the artistic gesture moves beyond representation and acts directly upon the material surface.
The performance painting transforms over the next few hours while the silk soaks up the colors and sets.