artist statement

Paula Oberndorfer (*1996) is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Tallinn and Vienna, currently enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. her artistic practice investigates the topics and materiality of beauty, fragility, and stability through the form of sculpture, utilising materials such as porcelain, clay and metal. her sculptures aim to evoke emotions, as she works with themes of suspension and mimicry, drawing analogies from materials to the human psyche. Oberndorfer works in a site-specific manner, showing interest in the architecture of a space, representing the secondary frame of an artwork, as well as the traces left by its human occupation.

Paula Oberndorfer is known for their sensible creations from metal and ceramics. Coming from a performative background, the objects relate to physical form and exist in relation to the body. The artist investigates the materiality of beauty and its fragile stability by creating sculptures that hang in suspension. This fragility and deception is communicated by the means of mimicry, as the artist is choosing to shape and glaze their objects to associate their appearance with metal.

Born in 1996 in Vienna, Austria, Oberndorfer studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 2020-2024, with an exchange period in Tallinn, Estonia from 2022-2023, and at the Kunstuniversität Linz from 2018-2019. The artist was a nominee for the Estonian Young Sculptor Award in 2023. Oberndorfer was a resident at the Copper Leg Residency in Vaskjala, Estonia in 2023, commissioned with the production of an outdoor installation.