Otto Zitko
So What

22 FEB until 24 APR 2025

Crone presents the solo exhibition So What by the Austrian artist Otto Zitko, whose abstract works are the result of pure unbridled intuition and emotion. On display are 14 large-format wall panels in which the performative act of painting becomes vividly tangible.

The art magazine Monopol once described Otto Zitko as the “Lord of the lines”. He himself says: “I started painting a line sometime in the late 1980s and never stopped.” Since then, this line has run through all of his works. He paints it on canvases, aludibond panels, walls and ceilings. He intuitively gives it free rein, depending on how he feels and what he is experiencing at the moment. 

Like a seismograph, Zitko uses this never-ending line to record what he absorbs from his surroundings, his environment or global events. In this way, he creates fascinating, shimmering meshes that captivate the viewer and touch them emotionally.

In the exhibition So What, Otto Zitko shows particularly remarkable works that he has created over the last 30 years and mean a lot to him personally – including new, current paintings, in which “his” line seems to seek a way out of the confusion and turmoil of our times.

Otto Zitko was born in 1959 in Linz and studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. His monumental spatial drawings can be found on the walls of museums, restaurants, churches, and other institutions worldwide. Numerous international art institutions and biennials have dedicated solo exhibitions to him or presented his works in major surveys on the theme of “abstraction,” including the Art Museum of China in Beijing, the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, S.M.A.K. in Ghent, the Museum of Art in Tucson (Arizona), the Kunsthalle Bern, the Secession in Vienna, the Manifesta in St. Petersburg, the Triennale India in New Delhi, the Albertina in Vienna, the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki.