Bernd Oppl

Born 1980 in Innsbruck, Austria

Lives and works in Vienna, Austria

Bernd Oppl’s artistic fields of action are architectural spatial models, photographs, video installations, transfer models and screens that combine to form complex systems which inspire and question, analyse and deceive our perception. With the help of camera and video, we are able to have new visual experiences and to gain changed perspectives that we would not experience with the unaided eye. Bernd Oppl makes use of these means and reaches surprising horizons of experience and impressive images through sensitively controlled and interlocking settings. In his installations, illusion and reality coalesce into a conglomerate that challenges the viewer and illustrates the possibilities and effects of a digitally shaped present. 

‘In my work I track the question of what spaces we move in: in foreign and self-created, in real and virtual architectures, in outer and inner, in physical and mental spaces. By what social changes and technologies these spaces are formed and influenced. When new shapes of space appear or disappear from our lives. Usually, spaces are containers for life situations. Life takes place in space. In my objects and installations, the spaces themselves become protagonists and begin to tell themselves what happens or does not happen in them. 

Bernd Oppl studied painting and graphic arts at the Art University Linz and video and video installation at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. He has presented his works in solo exhibitions at the Kunsthaus Dornbirn (AUT), Georgia Museum of Art (USA), the Tyrolian State Museum Ferdinandeum Innsbruck (AUT), Wiels – Contamporary Center of Art Brussels (BLG), Kuiper Projects in Brisbane (AUS), Kunstraum Dornbirn (AUT), Lentos Art Museum in Linz (AUT), Galerie Krinzinger in Vienna (AUT), and others. Oppl received the Award for Contemporary Art of the Province of Tyrol 2008, the RLB Art-Price 2012, the Art Award of the City of Innsbruck 2015, the Residency Scholarship for WIELS in 2018 (Brussels), the Austrian State Scholarship for fine arts 2019, the Residency Scholarship 2022 for BANFF center (Canada). the Award for best experimental film work of the Film Festival Best Austrian Animation 2022.