Mersolis Schöne

Drawing as sculpting into oneself.

Encounter is central to Mersolis Schöne’s work. Drawing and film can become spaces for meeting, listening and thinking together – creating a poetic sphere in which something new and perhaps previously unimaginable can emerge.

His Memory Sculptures grow from a recurring vocabulary of signs and symbols. Each carries meaning, but every new constellation creates new relationships. The drawings can be read like poems: never exhausted by a single reading, they remain open to new connections each time we return to them.

Each Memory Sculpture is an invitation to encounter and mutual transformation. Drawing becomes both a thinking tool and a poetic object – a space in which thoughts, images, sounds and gestures can meet, affect one another and give rise to new connections. In this sense, drawing means shaping inward by opening outward.

Alongside drawing, Schöne develops an independent experimental film practice. At times both practices meet, as in the award-winning “Love – A Memory Sculpture” (2019), developed from an arts-based-philosophy residency in India.

Schöne lives and works in Vienna and has been a member of Künstlerhaus Wien since 2022.

Mersolis Schöne has been developing Memory Sculpture as an ongoing artistic practice since 2006. Over the years, it has taken different forms – from drawings and series on paper to exhibitions, performances, collaborative processes and interdisciplinary settings.

An important early stage was the project “Gedächtnisskulptur / Memory Sculpture” (2008–2009) at Stadtmuseum Kassel, conceived and directed by Schöne in cooperation with the German Association of Visual Artists (BBK). Performative and dialogical settings were used to explore memory as something that can be actively shaped, shared and transformed.

Since then, Memory Sculptures have been presented and created in museums, galleries, concerts and performative settings internationally. The practice has repeatedly entered into dialogue with music, literature, movement and other artistic forms, including collaborations with composer and pianist Katharina Klement, live drawing at Künstlerhaus Factory in Vienna, and Schöne’s participation in the Komponist:innenforum Mittersill.

Works and projects have been presented in contexts including Adishakti Laboratory for Arts & Research in India, Fluxmuseum in Texas, Berry Campbell Gallery in New York, Galerie am Park in Vienna and IN...