Tobias Pils was born in Linz in 1971 and lives in Vienna. From 1990 to 1994 he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He received, among others, the Otto Mauer Prize (1994) and the Anton Faistauer Prize for Painting (2011). Since the early 1990s, he has participated and continues to participate in numerous exhibitions, and his work has been exhibited at the Landesmuseum Linz (2003), the Vienna Secession (2013), the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop (2017 and 2018), and the Eva Presenhuber (CH), Gisela Capitain (DE), and Capitain Petzel (DE) galleries, among others. Extensive solo exhibitions took place in 2016 at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa (U.S.A.) and in 2017 at Kunsthalle Krems; in 2022 Le Consortium, Dijon (F) dedicates a solo show to Tobias Pils. "Tobias Pils' paintings are paradoxes. Each artwork is at once process and product, gain and loss, impenetrable and transparent, planned and random. We see lines, grids, textures of various kinds, combined with mechanical and organic forms. The representational is hinted at, but a clear legibility is prevented. There are only set pieces and fragments, which evoke arbitrary metaphorical connections in the viewer. Just as interpretation goes its own way -depending on the intuitive promptings of the viewer- the painting process in Tobias Pils' work is also an exploration of the intuitive. Starting from a specific motif, Pils is open to everything that happens in the process of creation when he paints his pictures, so that in the end his pictures ideally seem strange to him themselves. In doing so, Pils dispenses with chromatic colors and increases his concentration by working exclusively with gray tones. They form an entity in Pils' oeuvre and create moods that are both quite unique and peculiar. At the same time, the reduced color palette points to a conceptual approach similar to that of monochrome or purely gestural painting." (Text source: Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne)