Lisa Slawitz's soloshow at SINK in Vienna.
Lisa Slawitz: Shadow of the Colossus
21 January - 20 February, 2026
SINK, Vienna
Those who paint, court danger. At least that’s what the more familiar myths of painting would have us believe: the canvas here, the gung-ho painter there, and between them a tough, uncompromising struggle for the image. Heroic stuff, truly. Perhaps a little out of date?
Heroic poses are something the painter Lisa Slawitz can usually do without in her art. Which doesn’t mean painting lacks existential weight for her. “I understand my painting process as an act of conjuring,” she says. What, exactly, is summoned in the process—and how this mysterious presence relates to the act of painting—is what Slawitz’s current installation at SINK sets out to explore.
She has grandiosely titled her work Shadow of the Colossus. Anyone versed in gaming—as Slawitz is—will recognize the reference. Shadow of the Colossus is the name of a legendary Japanese video game released in 2005. Players assume the role of the young hero Wander, who must slay sixteen monsters—the titular colossi—to rescue the woman he loves from certain death. Clips of these encounters abound on YouTube: Solemn music swells moments after each defeat, as the colossus collapses to the ground.
Slawitz’s Shadow of the Colossus unfolds rather differently. Rather than dramatic, it opts for understatement. The setup feels deliberately plain, even provisional. The installation consists of two elements: a vertically positioned wooden board draped in black fabric and, at roughly the same height, a print that spreads across the entire floor and creeps slightly up the wall in the exhibition space. The print reproduces of a painting Slawitz presented in a solo show at New Jörg in 2024. The picture shows a face peering out from behind a curtain or a door, eyes fixed squarely on the viewer. Its title: Ja, wer schaut da? (Look Who’s Looking)
For this installation, Slawitz inverted the painting’s colors and stretched the image vertically, lending it a faint resemblance to the famously anamorphic skull in Hohlbein’s The Ambassadors (1533)—that bleak memento mori cutting across the painting’s perspectival order. Slawitz pushes the idea further, extending the anamorphosis into physical space. The image seems poised to slip away across the floor, as though weary of its confined, immobile existence on a two-dimensional surface. A disquieting notion: an image emancipated from its support, haunting its surroundings as a specter—a disembodied, free-floating shadow of its former self. But how does one reclaim such a specter?
Colossi, ghosts, self-liberated images: painting is a reckless enterprise. Nearly as reckless as challenging a giant to a duel. The heroic self-mythology of painting may feel antiquated, overwrought, even silly. Yet it’s stubbornly resilient. As resilient as painting itself. Slawitz knows this. More than that, she embraces it.
With a blend of fascination and irony, Shadow of the Colossus casts a sideways glance at the “drama” of painting: the grappling with form, with images that threaten to exceed their bounds—sometimes even overwhelming the pictorial space itself. What emerges is a compact, endearingly eccentric allegory of painting and of the ghost stories and heroic tales—some more credible than others—that continue to be told about it. Those who paint, court danger? Indeed. As if to underline the point, Slawitz carved a triumphant “I was here” into the verso of her installation.
Text: Maximilian Steinborn Translation: Georg Bauer
Photo: Thomas Steineder