Charim presents Paintings again, wieder Bilder, a solo exhibition of new work by Vienna-based artist Eiko Gröschl, produced over the past three years. Working in oil across varying scales, Gröschl draws on fragments of everyday experience: natural settings, architectural elements, and anonymous figures in streets and parks, oscillate between observation and recollection. Recurring elements such as trees, fishing scenes, and weights from the artist’s daily workouts form a loose, subjective vocabulary grounded in habitual gestures, while becoming almost iconographic motifs. 

Both familiar and uncanny, these images seem to hover at a distance, as if veiled by a thin, dreamlike membrane. Gröschl’s painting process embraces contingency and chance as generative methods. Using raw canvas as drop cloths beneath paintings he is currently working on, residual drips, traces, and sediment from earlier works form a foundation for new compositions – rhyming with the approach of American painter Joe Bradley, who uses the studio floor to complicate and enrich the surface of his work. Such chance accumulations in Gröschl’s practice appear almost as clusters of a soft, contemporary form of pointillism, adding to the material richness and dreamlike quality of his surfaces. In the painting White dinghy (2025), for instance, a line of trees emerges in warm, autumnal spots of rose, orange, and yellow along the upper edge of the painting, originating from a sequence of stains. With the artist’s technique shifting between dense impasto and thin, fluid applications of paint, pigment is at times deliberately dissolved or lifted with turpentine. These blurred, unstable surfaces evoke the fugitive quality of memory and suggested narratives in the composition break down under the painting process. 

Gröschl’s work clearly enters into dialogue with historical painting – from the mid-career still-lifes and landscapes of Matisse, to the oneiric figuration of Marc Chagall, and, through more recent painters such as Peter Doig. There are also the more contemporaneous fellow travellers: Dominique Knowles’ dreamlike environments or the process-heavy figuration of Ser Serpas – similarly foregrounding chance, material entanglement, and contingency, and echoing Gröschl’s process of negotiation and compromise. 

Set against a contemporary condition defined by acceleration, fragmentation, and the constant circulation of images continually demanding attention and response, Gröschl’s work – intensely atmospheric and psychologically charged – captures peculiar moments of suspended time. Forms appear and recede, shaped by shifting light and lived experience. Resisting fixed meaning, the paintings hold open a space of ambiguity, pause and more open-ended reflection within an increasingly compressed and demanding present. 

In 2025, Gröschl was artist-in-residence at Charim Factory, where he developed large-scale paintings over six months, several of which are presented in Paintings again, wieder Bilder. His first monograph is forthcoming.