Théo Viardin's 'Orphaned' at Galerie Kandlhofer

Théo Viardin's second solo exhibition at Galerie Kandlhofer in Vienna, titled 'Orphaned,' runs until May 15, 2026. The show features eleven oil paintings created over the past two years, exploring themes of crisis, inheritance, and spiritual loss. Viardin's anthropomorphic figures blend the archaic and futuristic, with precise hands and feet contrasting looser, improvisational bodies. Works like 'Sacred Study, Green' (2026) reference Bellini but introduce a digital-glitch quality, while 'Study for a Revelation' (2026) features a lamb with spiritual charge. 'Post-apocalypse, II' (2026) uses a cross as negative space, echoing Fra Angelico's 'Mocking of Christ.' The exhibition is framed around mourning for a lost spiritual world and stable symbolic structures, yet the paintings push toward an active, visceral vitality. Viardin describes the title as born from anguish over humanity's damage to the living world and climate, but also notes a strange freedom in inheriting without instruction.