RESIDENCY
Paulina Emilia Aumayr · Residency
Paulina Emilia Aumayr undertook a COLLECTA residency in Shanghai, extending her Vienna-based painting practice into a new body of work that casts painted canvas fragments in resin.
Aumayr's paintings work through the everyday structures that sustain gendered violence rather than depicting violent acts directly, using recurring motifs — dogs, teeth, the human neck — that hold intimacy and threat within the same image. In Shanghai, she began working with resin casting for the first time, embedding painted canvas fragments inside cast resin panels. The technique interrupts the flatness of the paintings she has developed to date: a canvas surface is no longer only looked at, but sealed, suspended, and made partially opaque, so that the image beneath is held at a distance even as the object itself becomes more physically present.
This shift extends a concern already present in her installation work — the tension between hypervisibility and concealment — into the material structure of the work itself. Where a painting can be hung high or hidden in a niche, a resin-cast canvas is, by construction, already half-obscured: visible and sealed off at once.
Paulina Emilia Aumayr (b. 2002, Vienna) lives and works in Vienna. Since 2021, she has studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in Daniel Richter’s class. Her work has been presented at Galerie Kandlhofer, Galerie Krinzinger, VinVin Galerie, Galerie Michael Bella, Weserhalle Berlin, and Parallel Art Fair.
Working between painting and text, Aumayr explores the intersections of intimacy and violence, making visible the subtle and systemic structures of patriarchal power. Through colour, gesture, and language, she develops works charged with tension, vulnerability, and confrontation.
- Location
- Shanghai
- Duration
- April - June, 2026
Paulina Emilia Aumayr, Business as Usual, oil on canvas, 2026, 155 × 115 cm. Photo credit by Kaiho Yu
Paulina Emilia Aumayr, I hope you have the day you deserve (3-4) , oil on canvas, 2026, 80 × 20 cm (diptych 4). Photo credit by Kaiho Yu
Paulina Emilia Aumayr, *eady-Made Answers (2), oil on canvas, 2026, 20 × 20 cm. Photo credit Kaiho Yu
Paulina Emilia Aumayr, Suitable for Consumption, oil on canvas, 2026, 115 × 155 cm. Photo credit Kaiho Yu
Paulina Emilia Aumayr, Default Settings, resin, oil on canvas, wood, metal nails, 2026, 329 × 500 × 208 cm. Photo credit by Paulina Emilia Aumayr
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