Jury Statement: MARTIN RAINER PRIZE – PERIPHERIES
The artist Martin Rainer (1923–2012), who worked in Brixen, was never concerned with what stands at the core, nor with what is statically balanced or precisely calibrated. Instead, his gaze was directed toward the margins, toward those fraying edges where contours begin to blur. These places of the unfinished, the imperfect, and the ambiguous became central to his artistic practice—fully in line with his credo: “The perfect is majestic and boring.” He was drawn to people on the margins of society, to what shifts between realities, and to seemingly inconspicuous things. It was precisely those indeterminate zones, where much remains possible, that sparked his interest.
On the basis of these premises, the jury—Lisa Trockner, director of the SKB; Josef Rainer, artist; Paulus Rainer, curator at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna; Hannes Egger, artist and recipient of the 2024 recognition award; and Martina Oberprantacher, director of Kunsthaus Merano—selected, for this year’s Martin Rainer Prize, artists whose work enters into a fruitful dialogue with that of Martin Rainer. The 2026 prize—comprising one main award and two recognition awards—is conceived as interdisciplinary and honors positions that engage, both conceptually and/or formally, with what lies outside the center: with eccentricity in the original sense of the term.
The two recognition awards were presented to the artist Sylvie Riant, who lives and works in Terenten near Bruneck, and to the artist duo Florian Gass and Mirja Reuter, who live and work in Berlin and Munich.
Sylvie Riant—like Martin Rainer—turns away from the heroic ideal and toward the human being in their existential fragility. Particularly noteworthy is her work Aufbruch (2026), consisting of a walker made of wax and a video. Within the staging, the walker becomes an “object of absence”—an altar of personal ritual practice that evokes the sick or deceased body as a peripheral, barely visible figure. This aesthetic of withdrawal closely corresponds to Rainer’s sensitivity to the interpersonal, whose sculptures resonate through a quiet, often painful presence.
The uncultivated “Raine”—understood in Martin Rainer’s sense not as a boundary but as an interface—shape the practice of Gass and Reuter. Situated between art and social context, they advocate for the structural opening of institutional (art) spaces, thereby creating places that allow for ambiguity and multiplicity of voices. Their participatory works, particularly their shadow and puppet theatre projects developed in collaboration with children and young people, open up new social perspectives and enable forms of shared aesthetic experience. This mode of co-creation shows a strong affinity with Rainer’s collective and participatory artistic practice, which left a lasting imprint on the city of Brixen.
The main prize is awarded to the Austrian artist Thomas Feuerstein, who lives and works in Vienna. In his work, the periphery becomes a productive space of transition—a zone of becoming and transformation. Despite formal and medial differences, clear parallels to Martin Rainer emerge: both resist the notion of art as a static center and shift meaning toward the margins—between life and death, form and process, authorship and system. Thomas Feuerstein radicalizes this perspective by not merely representing the periphery, but enacting it in real terms. In bodies of work such as METABOLICA, his sculptures are based on biological, chemical, and algorithmic processes. Microorganisms produce and decompose material, respond to environmental conditions, and keep the work in a state of permanent transformation. Sculpture here becomes a system, time an active factor, and authorship something distributed across processes and non-human agents. Martin Rainer and Thomas Feuerstein thus stand less in a direct line of tradition than within a shared movement of thought. Both conceive of art as an open process in which meaning is not fixed but remains subject to negotiation. The periphery thus becomes a site of productive uncertainty—a space in which art does not affirm, but questions.
Jury Statement: MARTIN RAINER PRIZE – PERIPHERIES
The artist Martin Rainer (1923–2012), who worked in Brixen, was never concerned with what stands at the core, nor with what is statically balanced or precisely calibrated. Instead, his gaze was directed toward the margins, toward those fraying edges where contours begin to blur. These places of the unfinished, the imperfect, and the ambiguous became central to his artistic practice—fully in line with his credo: “The perfect is majestic and boring.” He was drawn to people on the margins of society, to what shifts between realities, and to seemingly inconspicuous things. It was precisely those indeterminate zones, where much remains possible, that sparked his interest.
On the basis of these premises, the jury—Lisa Trockner, director of the SKB; Josef Rainer, artist; Paulus Rainer, curator at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna; Hannes Egger, artist and recipient of the 2024 recognition award; and Martina Oberprantacher, director of Kunsthaus Merano—selected, for this year’s Martin Rainer Prize, artists whose work enters into a fruitful dialogue with that of Martin Rainer. The 2026 prize—comprising one main award and two recognition awards—is conceived as interdisciplinary and honors positions that engage, both conceptually and/or formally, with what lies outside the center: with eccentricity in the original sense of the term.
The two recognition awards were presented to the artist Sylvie Riant, who lives and works in Terenten near Bruneck, and to the artist duo Florian Gass and Mirja Reuter, who live and work in Berlin and Munich.
Sylvie Riant—like Martin Rainer—turns away from the heroic ideal and toward the human being in their existential fragility. Particularly noteworthy is her work Aufbruch (2026), consisting of a walker made of wax and a video. Within the staging, the walker becomes an “object of absence”—an altar of personal ritual practice that evokes the sick or deceased body as a peripheral, barely visible figure. This aesthetic of withdrawal closely corresponds to Rainer’s sensitivity to the interpersonal, whose sculptures resonate through a quiet, often painful presence.
The uncultivated “Raine”—understood in Martin Rainer’s sense not as a boundary but as an interface—shape the practice of Gass and Reuter. Situated between art and social context, they advocate for the structural opening of institutional (art) spaces, thereby creating places that allow for ambiguity and multiplicity of voices. Their participatory works, particularly their shadow and puppet theatre projects developed in collaboration with children and young people, open up new social perspectives and enable forms of shared aesthetic experience. This mode of co-creation shows a strong affinity with Rainer’s collective and participatory artistic practice, which left a lasting imprint on the city of Brixen.
The main prize is awarded to the Austrian artist Thomas Feuerstein, who lives and works in Vienna. In his work, the periphery becomes a productive space of transition—a zone of becoming and transformation. Despite formal and medial differences, clear parallels to Martin Rainer emerge: both resist the notion of art as a static center and shift meaning toward the margins—between life and death, form and process, authorship and system. Thomas Feuerstein radicalizes this perspective by not merely representing the periphery, but enacting it in real terms. In bodies of work such as METABOLICA, his sculptures are based on biological, chemical, and algorithmic processes. Microorganisms produce and decompose material, respond to environmental conditions, and keep the work in a state of permanent transformation. Sculpture here becomes a system, time an active factor, and authorship something distributed across processes and non-human agents. Martin Rainer and Thomas Feuerstein thus stand less in a direct line of tradition than within a shared movement of thought. Both conceive of art as an open process in which meaning is not fixed but remains subject to negotiation. The periphery thus becomes a site of productive uncertainty—a space in which art does not affirm, but questions.
