Toni Schmale

Toni Schmale’s (b. 1980, Hamburg, lives and works in Vienna) practice encompasses sculptures as well as performative interventions, video pieces, and graphic art. Her work scrutinizes social power relations and a hegemonic society’s stereotypical gender roles, which she counters with gender-political utopias served up with characteristically sly humor masking radical dauntlessness. Schmale’s metal, concrete, and rubber sculptures have the air of a fleet of dysfunctional machines while also calling up associations of fitness equipment and torture instruments, surveying a wide terrain crisscrossed by desires, from the yearning for physical perfection to practices of sexual gratification.