Technology is a chase. Snap a picture on your smartphone, and you’ve bypassed a whole night’s sleep’s worth of waiting to see the image you’ve captured. Hell, ask the LLM of your choice to represent whatever prompt you could dream of stringing together into an image, and you’ve surrendered the entire process to the perennial Algorithm. In nearly all aspects of life, the public has begun to reckon with how they will move into a new era with today’s burgeoning technologies—assuming blind allegiance, willful defiance, or sitting in the ambivalent in-between. 

​But what does it mean to reclaim The Creative Process as it once was, the winding journey that precedes a gratifying destination? Artist Evelyn Plaschg, whose media have ranged from graphic design to oil paint to music, has flipped the script on creative automation—taking photographs of the physically and culturally commonplace, and distorting them into paintings beyond comprehension or reality. Her works are vibrant and dizzying, ruminating on color and form and reality. A zipper becomes skin, or a wound, distilled down to its permission to open. Fabric folds into something bodily; color thickens into substance; ordinary objects lose the function that once made them traditionally legible to the human eye. 

​There is something almost radical in that slowness. Master paintings have long been discussed through the time they demand—months, years, entire lives organized around looking, layering, revising, failing, beginning again. The contemporary image economy, by contrast, moves with a reflexive immediacy. A photograph can be taken without intention, an image can be generated without contact, and a memory can be outsourced before it is fully felt. Plaschg’s practice moves through the digital world only to return, insistently, to one of the oldest artistic media known to man.​

Born in Gnas, Austria, and based in Vienna, Plaschg came to fine art after working in graphic design, moving through drawing and works on paper before arriving, only in recent years, at oil paint. This summer, Plaschg appears in ibid., a group exhibition at Kunstverein Nürnberg – Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft, on view from through September 6, following her June presentation with Gallery House and Kirchgasse Gallery during Zürich Art Weekend. This September, she will release her debut album via Plot Toy, returning to music after three years. 

​At the center of many art-world debates of today is the question of process: which processes matter, and whom do we want making art—humans or machines? Plenty of artists throughout history have delegated parts of their processes—to assistants, to chance, to systems—but what feels newly urgent is not delegation itself, but the disappearance of friction. When the distance between idea and image collapses entirely, what is lost in that absence of resistance? What happens to the body in the act of making?

​Plaschg’s work seems to insist on that resistance. Her paintings do not reject the photographic or the digital outright; rather, they pass through them, metabolizing the image until it becomes something else entirely. The source dissolves. What remains is a surface that feels labored over, worked through, touched. There is a tension between recognition and estrangement—a sense that the viewer is seeing something familiar, but can no longer name it with certainty. In that instability, meaning expands rather than resolves.

​To paint in the year 2026 A.D. is to stare in the face of a shortcut and deliberately choose to take the long way home. It is to privilege duration over immediacy, embodiment over efficiency, doubt over resolution. Plaschg’s practice does not offer an answer to the technological condition so much as it lingers inside of it, stretching time where it has been compressed, thickening images where they have been flattened.

​Below, Plaschg discusses the slowness of painting, the physicality of color, the bodily charge of zippers and fabric, working between abstraction and figuration, and what she is chasing next.

​Tell me about yourself—where did you grow up, and who has been influential in your life, personally or artistically?

​I grew up in Austria, in the countryside. Fine art came rather late. I was doing graphic design before. I had been studying art, and it was my friends who encouraged me to start with art.

​Are there any artists whose work has inspired you in your own creation, or where do you draw inspiration from?

​It changes. I like the period of the Abstract Expressionists, like American painters in the ’60s and ’80s. And now, an artist I admire, for example, is Jacqueline Humphries and Wade Guyton. 

​I think painting became, after a long time, something I’m really interested in or drawn to, but it developed very slowly. It took me a very long time to see myself as a painter and also to start painting, because I came more from graphic art and drawing. I was working on paper for a long period of time and just started three years ago to use oil paint, which is my medium now, during a residency program at ISCP in New York.

What made you want to paint?

​It’s a visual way of receiving or perceiving the world, to use a visual intelligence to communicate. I like painting especially because it’s a very manual and rather slow process. It’s a very old medium.

​I’m especially interested in where photography and painting meet. Our habit is to be surrounded by a lot of photography and digital media, and I’m interested in intertwining those two ways of seeing, or those two mediums: super-slow, seemingly immediate photographic imagery versus a very slowed-down process oriented around painting, if that makes sense.

​That does feel very relevant to the times of today—choosing to slow down. What are themes, ideas, or emotions that you see across your body of work, and how do they show up in that work?

​With most of the works I’m producing, I start with photographs that I take with my smartphone of my immediate surroundings or my environment. So there’s a recording process in advance, and I look out for objects. The body plays a central role, as do other culturally produced environments.

​I think I look out for a certain physicality in what I look at: roots or industrial surfaces, textures, and also the subjective or collective physicality in relation to architecture or fragments of urban life. After I have this archive of photographic imagery, I carefully pre-select images that I find interesting and often isolate them, zoom in, transform the colors, and translate them into this painterly logic.

​I like that the things I look at, through the process of painting and altering the image, transform or are able to transform into something else. So the original function of, let’s say, an avocado I painted changes throughout this process and becomes open again. It’s not necessarily representative of the fruit anymore; it can become something else, like a brain or an organ or a cell.

​Often when I paint, I work a lot with fabric, too. The folds, how I see the garments, often remind me of something in the body or a detail. It’s a very physical approach. I’m also interested in color. I see color not only as a description or a surface, but as something that has the potential to bring a thing into a different world or highlight something. It is also a physical substance that behaves in a certain way. It is dense or resistant, but it’s moving.

‍​Across your body of work, paintings appear zoomed or blurred. With your photography and how you take these images and transform them into painterly logic, can you tell me about perspective in your work?

​I don’t think so much about perspective, but I have the tendency to isolate certain details from a background. Often there’s not a background and a foreground, or an object in a background, but it’s all one.

​I am, of course, interested in creating image depth with sharpness or blurriness, and I like to alter an object so that it becomes disorienting. I like to give up the hierarchy of up and down, left and right. I really like to create this unsettling feeling that you don’t know what you’re looking at or where you are in relation to what you’re looking at. You create some uncanny architectures that can be in front of you from a very small detail or thing.

Two pieces that really stood out to me when I was looking through your works were two paintings, both named Permission, one from 2024 and one from 2025. Can you tell me about these two works?

​With these works, I looked at a garment of mine, a cloth, nylon clothing, and staged some photographs. In the yellow one, called Permission, there is a zipper depicted with folds hanging beside it. Zippers reoccur in my paintings sometimes because this object has a metaphorical tension within it. I like that it can tell a lot. It’s about opening and closing, like the skin or something you dress with.

​The blue one is pretty large. It’s like two meters by 150 centimeters, while the yellow one is rather small, like 120 centimeters in height. This detail of the yellow one has some connotations to it. There’s this little gap or opening on the bottom of the zipper. I painted this one twice. It’s called Vi from 2025 in red, which has a strong connotation of a vulva.

​The blue one also involves a zipper, but it reminds me more of a cascade of color floating down. It’s viscous but also cascading.

​What made you want to revisit *Permission* as an idea a year later?

​There’s a trigger of permission to open up or let it flow involved for me. It’s an association, something like free-floating or pouring down. Maybe it’s also just pouring down or falling, involved in the structure, that made me think of the term *permission*. Sometimes you try to be in control, or you keep something closed or secretive.

​What are your biggest aspirations as an artist?

​I want to continue developing a body of work that is precise in what I do. I hope I can show more internationally and explore new scenes or markets. I want to travel.

​For future shows or next projects, I would be happy to continue developing more of an installation. I want to work more installatively again, as I did in my last show. I’m interested in assembling paintings. It’s important to put the paintings into relation with each other. Often I hang them in a sequence, but I’m really drawn to this idea of an image body or body images that can behave in a space, not only on the wall. That would be a goal for the next project.

What are you working on now?

​At the moment, I’m working on something different because I also make music, and I will release my first album in September with music I’ve been working on over the last few years with the label Plot Toy.

​In the studio, I’m trying to repeat what I’ve been working on. I use the same images more often and do variations of them. It feels like a laboratory somehow, or like a photographic laboratory, in the sense that I change colors and explore color relations. I’m interested in how to really cook down the things and objects I’ve been recording into very minimal structures, or exaggerate them and deconstruct them again. I try to move more into that abstract zone because I think my paintings, or the images, are always in between figuration and abstraction. They are mediating between those two things. I try to find that sweet spot where the work still has some kind of representational function, but it’s dissolving.

​You’re so interdisciplinary and work across media. In recent years, you’ve been named in the press as an artist to watch or as up-and-coming. How do those titles resonate with you? How do they make you feel?

​It’s flattering, of course. I’m happy if I occur or am tagged as this kind of artist, but I know that these things are also very quick to change. I wouldn’t rely on those terms. For me personally, as a practicing artist, I need more for myself to keep going and continue the process and to really feel stable in myself or with what I’m doing. But if there’s interest outside, I’m very happy about it, of course.

The theme of this issue is “Chasing the SAun.” When you think about your career and your artistic life, what is something you feel as though you are chasing?

When I think about my career and artistic life, it’s about moving around internationally with what I do. To be able to cross borders, see more of the world, and share something of my experiences or my world. What drives me forward is stepping into new scenes, meeting interesting artists and people, and things I don’t know about yet. There’s a kind of curiosity. On the one hand, it’s trying to relate to the art world in a way. At the same time, there’s this urge to figure out how to paint, how to make a good exhibition and how to really pin it down. To really make good work that addresses the topics that are in my head. It’s such a strong urge that keeps me going. I think it would never stop, or I would never run out of thoughts or ideas about how to make it better the next time.

Is there anything else you wanted to add?

There are two thoughts that are important for my work. The subject matter I’m choosing comes from an interest in the apparent naturalness of our material environment and the desire it evokes. Many things seem self-evident, but are very often the result of cultural construction or industrial optimization. For example, in the fruits I paint, it’s maybe the most obvious because they’re connected with nature or something nurturing. At the same time, there are things that have been bred for hundreds of years by humans. The same goes for materials like metal or glass and certain shapes. That’s one thought I wanted to add.