Book launch of our First Monograph on Toni Schmale and a lecture by Lex Morgan Lancaster
19 November 2025, 6.30pm
Phileas, Opernring 17, 1010 Vienna
On the occasion of the publication of our next First Monograph on the artist Toni Schmale, we are pleased to host a book launch and a lecture by Lex Morgan Lancaster.
By deconstructing familiar forms and reassembling them into new sculptural creations, Schmale situates her work within a feminist critique of normative body politics, gender binaries, and heteronormativity. Her abstract visual language serves to unburden the representation of marginalised bodies, highlighting the complex relationships between material, form, and identity. Through her precise yet ambiguous steel constructions, she challenges dominant narratives of power, inviting viewers into a space of reflection and resistance.
This publication is the first comprehensive overview of the sculptural and performative work of artist Toni Schmale (born 1980), whose practice explores the intersections of body, matter, and power structures. Engaging with industrial techniques and materials, Schmale investigates the relationship between physical and non-physical environments and challenges conventional perceptions of space, social power relations, and gender identification.
The scope of Schmale’s work is reflected in this volume through essays by curator Eduardo Andres Alfonso, based in New York; Sabeth Buchmann, Professor of Modern and Postmodern Art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna; Lex Morgan Lancaster, scholar, curator, and professor at The Cooper Union, New York; and writer Kate Sutton, based in Zagreb.
For the occasion of Toni Schmale’s book launch, we have invited Lex Morgan Lancaster, author of the text titled Toni Schmale’s Edging Aesthetics, to hold a lecture on queer abstraction. Schmale's sculptures elicit embodied encounters that give way to imaginative fantasy. Approaching this work from a queer-trans perspective, Lancaster's talk considers the larger field of queer abstraction in which Schmale is situated, demonstrating how hard-edged geometric form and material precision can nevertheless activate unruly dynamics of desire. The lecture will be in English.
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About Lex Morgan Lancaster:
Lex Morgan Lancaster (they/them) works at the intersections of queer and trans theory and contemporary art. Their research develops a queer-trans formalism, focusing on artworks that reject transparent representation in favour of volatile materiality and embodied encounter to produce queer, trans, anti-racist, and crip tactics.
