Marina Faust: VON BIS / FROM TO
A collaboration with Frac-Artothèque Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Limoges
Phileas, Opernring 17, Vienna
29 April – 26 September 2026
Opening: 28 April 2026, 7pm - 9pm
Marina Faust, Untitled (object nr. 08), 2005
During the summer, we are presenting an exhibition of the Austrian artist Marina Faust conceived as a preview of her forthcoming project at the Frac-Artothèque Nouvelle-Aquitaine. This solo exhibition is co-produced by Phileas and will open in Limoges, France, in the autumn.
The presentation focuses on Faust’s shoe series, shown here for the first time. In this body of work from the early 2000s, shoes appear not as everyday or fashion objects but as complex architectural structures. Over many years, Faust collected a wide range of shoe forms—from fashion design to models associated with erotic culture—before deconstructing them, sometimes wrapping them and altering their forms.
Faust often explores objects in relation to function and its withdrawal. Through subtle interventions and shifts of context, familiar items lose their original purpose and assume a new presence as autonomous sculptural forms.
This approach has shaped Faust’s artistic practice since her early photographic works. In the series Miniatures from the late 1980s, she documented daily gestures, fragmenting and isolating them from their original setting so that they appear strongly abstracted. The works move between familiarity and irritation, between proximity and distance, drawing attention to the structures and surfaces of things.
Everyday life is an important point of departure in Faust’s practice. Working across photography and sculpture, she examines ordinary objects and situations, placing them in new configurations. Through processes of appropriation and transformation, these elements acquire new layers of meaning. In this way, perception, function, and the cultural associations attached to objects are continually renegotiated.