Toni Schmale
Toni Schmale, Vienna, 27 January 2026
“To tell a story, just with a knee and a head”
With her sculptures made from steel and concrete, the Vienna-based artist Toni Schmale has committed herself to what is at times very hard physical work. At her atelier, she recalls formative phases and moments in her life and work to date: a bog mummy on her first visit to a museum together with her family, her pirate-like life as a media art student in Leipzig, the broadening of her gaze in the master classes of Monica Bonvicini and Carola Dertnig in Vienna, and the search for motifs—such as for her perhaps best-known work “Tanke 24/7”, now situated on Vienna’s Stefan-Weber-Platz, which invites one to linger but also seems as if hurled into the cityscape from a dystopian future. A look ahead, then? Or might Toni Schmale’s work also—thinking back to the bog mummy—have something to do with archeology?
“To tell a story, just with a knee and a head”
With her sculptures made from steel and concrete, the Vienna-based artist Toni Schmale has committed herself to what is at times very hard physical work. At her atelier, she recalls formative phases and moments in her life and work to date: a bog mummy on her first visit to a museum together with her family, her pirate-like life as a media art student in Leipzig, the broadening of her gaze in the master classes of Monica Bonvicini and Carola Dertnig in Vienna, and the search for motifs—such as for her perhaps best-known work “Tanke 24/7”, now situated on Vienna’s Stefan-Weber-Platz, which invites one to linger but also seems as if hurled into the cityscape from a dystopian future. A look ahead, then? Or might Toni Schmale’s work also—thinking back to the bog mummy—have something to do with archeology?