The world of Zenita Komad is at once pulsating metropolis and idyll, construction site, sophisticated retreat and temple. Her installations are sites and settings. Her object paintings are inhabitants of this city or universe, in that everything has the ability to change its guise. Categories are denied. In "Zenita Universe" art, science, music, literature and even big emotions find their place. A core topic in this cosmos is the question of identity. To fathom it, one needs to consider all its factors: ego, language, soul, roots, love, family, spirituality. Komad's works involve the viewer in this process by communicating: They question, answer and raise up new questions. Some go even further by physically reaching into the viewers space in virtue of their three-dimensional nature.

When visiting Zenita Komad in her studio apartment and discussing her art, it would seem as if time itself is in flight. As she enthusiastically explains, for the fair she plans to build a house of cards from screens, something similar to what she has already shown at the Kunsthaus Graz or at her Paris gallery. Her painting, she remarks thoughtfully, is not “strategic. I record, I take notes.” To this end, Komad is able to draw on a considerable reservoir: here, for example, one finds the furrowed brow and impishly smiling face of the sculptress Louise Bourgeois and, again, a rather distant Maria Callas; a self-portrait – and numerous typefaces for which Komad uses witty aphorisms (“Am eigenen Misthaufen ist jeder Hahn tapfer”/ “Every rooster is courageous atop his own heap of dung”): “Religion is dangerous”, reads one of her pictures, and the single letters run and tumble into one another assuming the form of a cross.

“I call anything ideological into question”, says Komad. This not only holds for religion, but also for psychoanalysis and its fathers, as well as the capacity for suffering in general and in particular. Where some may see wounds, she sees sensuality – in the breasts of one of her older works, for example, from which red paint issues.