ARCOlisboa 2025: Nana Mandl & Estrid Lutz

  • ARCOlisboa 2025

    Nana Mandl & Estrid Lutz
  • Nana Mandl (b. 1991 in Graz, Austria) studied at the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee and received her diploma in fine arts...
    Nana Mandl (b. 1991 in Graz, Austria) studied at the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee and received her diploma in fine arts at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna.
     
    Mandl creates expansive, colourful and material-intensive collages, composed of analog and digital image archives that she combines into precise and multi-layered images in which private memories meet the collective memory of a generation. In her practice, Mandl uses sticker motifs and decals, Disney characters and Bravo covers, handwriting and photos in conjunction with photoshop layouts and renderings, pixelated surfaces and visual information remains from digital image production, storage and reproduction. The canvas is repeatedly emphasized in terms of its materiality, different textiles meet and are processed in different ways and used embroidery as if a gestural brushstroke. In the work, sewn and embroidered items are an anchor point and antipole to the accelerated image production and circulation that characterizes digital technologies.
  • Nana Mandl presents a visually expansive and materially rich series of works that delves into the complexities of modern motherhood,...
    Nana Mandl
    task force, 2025
    embroidery and tube yarn on canvas, framed
    144 x 104 cm
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    Nana Mandl presents a visually expansive and materially rich series of works that delves into the complexities of modern motherhood, digital culture, and self-representation. Through her intricate, multi-layered collages—composed of fabric, digitally printed textiles, embroidery, and drawing—Mandl invites us to explore what lies beneath the surface.
     
    Central to Mandl’s work is her exploration of materials. Textiles, historically linked to female artistry, become a platform where contradictions and ambiguities play out. The fabric is both medium and metaphor for the societal pressures and personal identities that weave together in the experience of motherhood. Sourcing inspiration online and mining her digital archive, Mandl seeks images that resonate - through content, colour, silhouette or instinct. These are enlarged and simplified, printed and cut into large paper shapes, becoming patterns from which patterns are cut, forming a patchwork of texture and colour. This echoes the sensory overload of the digital world, where countless images and information constantly jostle for our attention.
  • Nana Mandl, girls on mothersday, 2025, embroidery and tube yarn on canvas, 90 x 130 cm
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  • Mandl’s works play with the possibility of a further sensory exploration of an image, allowing the viewer to engage and contend with an image beyond a surface layer. Through this laborious, multi-step process, Mandl contrasts the instant consumption of digital images with careful craftsmanship and in slowing down the image-making process, she transforms the intangible into something material, questioning the surface, the ambiguity of representation, and the contradictions of selfhood.
     
  • Nana Mandl, holiday special, 2025, embroidery and tube yarn on canvas, 90 x 120 cm
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  • Motherhood, filtered through the lens of selfie culture, is a central theme. Mandl draws inspiration from mirror selfies of mothers...
    Nana Mandl
    prospects, 2025
    textiles and embroidery on canvas
    90 x 50 cm
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    Motherhood, filtered through the lens of selfie culture, is a central theme. Mandl draws inspiration from mirror selfies of mothers with their children—intimate, yet highly curated moments of self-presentation. These images challenge traditional depictions of motherhood, positioning women as independent, strong, and self-aware. The child can be understood as an accessory in these scenes, underscoring the focus on the mother's reflection and her control over how she presents herself. Perhaps this subverts the patriarchal and capitalistic ideal of motherhood as a form of self-sacrifice, revealing instead the complexity between visibility and invisibility, empowerment and objectification. Mandl critiques the idealised vision of motherhood projected by a patriarchal, capitalist society, revealing the unrealistic, yet culturally pervasive, image of the ‘perfect’ mother.

  • Nana Mandl is the receipient
    of the 2024 Strabag Main Art Prize
  • Nana Mandl, bling ring, 2025, textiles, embroidery and beads on canvas, 90 x 120 cm
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  • Another key element of Mandl’s work is text. Upon the surface of large scale works, letters are sewn which create...
    Nana Mandl
    mini (smile), 2025
    textiles, embroidery and tube yarn on canvas
    25 x 18 cm
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    Another key element of Mandl’s work is text. Upon the surface of large scale works, letters are sewn which create a poetic dialogue with the visual elements of the figurative collages. Using rhythm, rhyme and double meaning, the text complicates the construction of meaning and context within the digital and the physical, the personal and the collective and the immediate and the profound.
     
    Mandl’s works unravel how digital culture and technology shapes our understanding of ourselves and others. Evoking the ever-changing nature of online existence, where identity and representation are constantly redefined, never enough invites reflection on the contradictions and complexity of modern life, social roles and pressures. Operating as haptic invitations to see beyond the surface, they call attention to the sensory richness of their materiality along with the tension between touch and image in the digital era.
     

  • Motherhood, filtered through the lens of selfie culture, is a central theme. Mandl draws inspiration from mirror selfies of mothers with their children—intimate, yet highly curated moments of self-presentation.
  • Nana Mandl girls on mothersday, 2025 embroidery and tube yarn on canvas 90 x 130 cm (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Nana Mandl holiday special, 2025 embroidery and tube yarn on canvas 90 x 120 cm (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Nana Mandl mini (purple, 2025 textiles on canvas 25 x 18 cm (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Nana Mandl mini (hand), 2025 textiles and embroidery on canvas 25 x 18 cm (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Nana Mandl bling ring, 2025 textiles, embroidery and beads on canvas 90 x 120 cm (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Nana Mandl mini (pink), 2025 textiles on canvas 25 x 18 cm (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Nana Mandl mini (smile), 2025 textiles, embroidery and tube yarn on canvas 25 x 18 cm (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Nana Mandl prospects, 2025 textiles and embroidery on canvas 90 x 50 cm (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Nana Mandl the balance act, 2025 textiles and embroidery on canvas, framed 124 x 94 cm (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Nana Mandl sit com, 2025 textiles, tube yarn, foam, varnish and wood 90 x 35 x 40 cm (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Nana Mandl task force, 2025 embroidery and tube yarn on canvas, framed 144 x 104 cm (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Nana Mandl
    girls on mothersday, 2025
    embroidery and tube yarn on canvas
    90 x 130 cm
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  • Estrid Lutz is a French artist born 1989 living and working in Puerto Escondido - Oaxaca Mexico. Lutz’s earliest artistic works could be seen as violent explorations of the surfaces where human interaction with non- human occurs, and effect takes place. All artworks embody her reoccurring interest in the concepts of the natural and the technological, often finding emotional or empathetic connections as well as physical touch-points between the two.
  • Since 2018, Lutz has lived and worked in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, Mexico where she found the perfect environment to develop...
    Estrid Lutz
    #CHAO SENSIBLE 004_sponge, 2024
    Blown glass, ink
    79 x 20 x 24 cm
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    Since 2018, Lutz has lived and worked in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, Mexico where she found the perfect environment to develop her work in by observing the rough natural environment of Zicatela, one of the most dangerous surf beaches in the world. In Puerto Escondido, Lutz has continued her research into biological organisms and ecosystems, and how humans and their technological materials are inspired by, interact with, and have an effect on these. Several experiments have had a direct relationship with the waves and beach: A hands-on approach that tests the boundaries of what’s possible.
  • Estrid Lutz, #CHAO SENSIBLE 005_sponge, 2024, Blown glass, hot molded, ink
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  • Explorations include being flown over the waves and between whirlwinds in an Ultralight Aircraft to drop drawings and flowers into...
    Estrid Lutz
    #CHAO SENSIBLE 0012_, 2024
    Blown glass, demineralized water, ink
    31 x 25 x 23 cm
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    Explorations include being flown over the waves and between whirlwinds in an Ultralight Aircraft to drop drawings and flowers into the ocean, having artworks taken out to sea on her behalf and documented in the pipelines, and burying the edges of large lenticular, photo- luminescent, and sun-sensitive works in the sand.
    Lutz’s practice embodies the blurring of dichotomies, investigating the interactions between the human-technological (science, polystyrene, aircraft) on the one hand, and the forces of nature on the other (pipelines, whirlwinds, animals) with sensitivity to emotional communication. In face of something more powerful than us, what is the significance of dropping flowers into giant waves?
  • Estrid Lutz, #CHAO SENSIBLE LUNG ABYSS, 2024 Blown glass, demineralized water, ink, 29 x 23 cm
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  • Estrid Lutz, #CHAO SENSIBLE LUNG ABYSS, 2024 Blown glass, demineralized water, ink, 29 x 23 cm
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  • Over the past years, Estrid Lutz has developed a highly complex elaboration process, in which science and introspection figuratively dissolve in imageries that escape our fixed gaze. While facing these medial hybrids, we are constantly exposed to the fact that whatever we see, in that very moment, will slip away and transform. What remains is an afterglow in which all images are stored on our retina as an ethereal and amorphous trace of colors; absorbed, mixed within our understanding of the world; forming our perception of what happens around us, but without a real grasp of the broader cosmic image. We chase the false idea of progressive change in a search to perfect everything that is in our range of vision, without understanding that everything is in constant movement and that we might just stop for a second to embrace and enjoy it.
  • Estrid Lutz #CHAO SENSIBLE 005_sponge, 2024 Blown glass, hot molded, ink 23 x 27.5 x 45 cm (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Estrid Lutz #CHAO SENSIBLE LUNG ABYSS, 2024 Blown glass, demineralized water, ink 29 x 23 cm (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Estrid Lutz #CHAO SENSIBLE 004_sponge, 2024 Blown glass, ink 79 x 20 x 24 cm (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Estrid Lutz #CHAO SENSIBLE 022, 2024 Blown glass, demineralized water, ink 15 x 12 x 10.5 cm (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Estrid Lutz #CHAO SENSIBLE 0012_, 2024 Blown glass, demineralized water, ink 31 x 25 x 23 cm (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Estrid Lutz #CHAO SENSIBLE LUNG ABYSS, 2024 Blown glass, demineralized water, ink 29 x 23 cm (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Estrid Lutz #CHAO SENSIBLE 0014_, 2024 Blown glass, demineralized water, ink 30 x 24 x 26 cm (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Estrid Lutz
    #CHAO SENSIBLE 005_sponge, 2024
    Blown glass, hot molded, ink
    23 x 27.5 x 45 cm
    Enquire