Wolfgang Semmelrock’s practice emerged from architecture and experimental spatial structures. With his first major presentation in Vienna in 2001 — combining inflatable objects, sound, light and video — he began his transition from architecture into art.

Through numerous self-initiated projects, installations and performances, he gradually developed his own artistic language and a particular fascination with what he calls paradoxical interventions.

Especially in his sculptural work, space is never understood as fixed or given. Inflatable objects, light, sound and spatial interventions expand and transform their surroundings, creating new situations and possibilities of perception. Familiar forms — a cube, a circle, an egg, wings or a flower — enter into new relationships with architecture, landscape and public space. The familiar becomes a starting point for discovering something not yet seen.

In painting, the process moves inward. Here, Semmelrock explores focus, energy and insight through the physical act of painting. Influenced by East Asian calligraphy and gestural traditions, he works with the tension between discipline and freedom: learning established techniques in order to intuitively break through them. The gesture becomes a moment of concentration in which control and spontaneity, knowledge and intuition meet.

Across both approaches, art becomes a process of transformation. Visitors frequently enter this process themselves — through workshops, participatory projects and painting performances, where they become part of a shared field of action, attention and energy.

Whether through an intervention in space or a single brushstroke, Semmelrock’s work begins with what appears familiar and opens it towards something new: space becomes changeable, perception becomes active, and art becomes a field of possibility.