Zuzy Praus is a contemporary Czech painter based in Vienna, where she works at Atelier HD.
Her practice centers on large-scale figurative painting, executed in egg tempera, charcoal, pastel, and oil on linen canvas. Working with traditional egg tempera — a medium that demands precision and does not allow correction — defines her visual language. Each layer is built deliberately. Each gesture is irreversible.
Her paintings explore psychological thresholds, duality, and mythic interior landscapes. Figures appear suspended between presence and absence, monument and vulnerability. The body becomes structure, memory, and symbolic architecture.
Praus moves between intimate journal-based studies and architectonic canvases, maintaining a disciplined material approach rooted in observation and compositional rigor.
She studied under the Austrian–Argentinian painter Helmut Ditsch and is part of his master–student lineage. Within this context, she works directly in his atelier and has collaborated with him on various artistic projects, including the film Helmut – Das Eis und die vergängliche Ewigkeit.
The conceptual axis of her formation follows a generational dialogue:
Ulrich Gansert – Helmut Ditsch – Zuzy Praus
Praus lives and works in Vienna.
Zuzy Praus is a contemporary Czech painter based in Vienna, where she works at Atelier HD.
Her practice centers on large-scale figurative painting, executed in egg tempera, charcoal, pastel, and oil on linen canvas. Working with traditional egg tempera — a medium that demands precision and does not allow correction — defines her visual language. Each layer is built deliberately. Each gesture is irreversible.
Her paintings explore psychological thresholds, duality, and mythic interior landscapes. Figures appear suspended between presence and absence, monument and vulnerability. The body becomes structure, memory, and symbolic architecture.
Praus moves between intimate journal-based studies and architectonic canvases, maintaining a disciplined material approach rooted in observation and compositional rigor.
She studied under the Austrian–Argentinian painter Helmut Ditsch and is part of his master–student lineage. Within this context, she works directly in his atelier and has collaborated with him on various artistic projects, including the film Helmut – Das Eis und die vergängliche Ewigkeit.
The conceptual axis of her formation follows a generational dialogue:
Ulrich Gansert – Helmut Ditsch – Zuzy Praus
Praus lives and works in Vienna.
What this exhibition explores
The Shape of Knowledge examines how images preserved in old books—engravings, diagrams, botanical drawings, astronomical charts, early photographs—gave form to ideas long before modern visualization tools existed.
The exhibition explores the ways in which people once interpreted nature, science, society, and the cosmos through images, revealing how knowledge was shaped, structured, and communicated visually.
Why this exhibition was conceived
The exhibition begins with a simple question: how did earlier generations visualize what they sought to understand?
Many of these images were created not as art objects but as instruments of explanation—yet, when viewed today, they exhibit an aesthetic precision and conceptual ambition that far exceed their original purpose.
The Shape of Knowledge invites viewers to reconsider these works not just as historical artifacts but as evidence of a long-standing human impulse: to give shape to the unknown through observation, imagination, and visual form.
The perspective that shapes this exhibition
Rather than presenting these materials strictly through scientific accuracy or historical chronology, The Shape of Knowledge brings together images from disparate fields—botany, astronomy, geology, sociology—through a shared perspective: the visual shaping of understanding.
The exhibition highlights how each image interprets reality in its own way, constructing meaning through line, structure, scale, and symbol.
Through this lens, the works collectively demonstrate how visual representation has long served as a bridge between the seen and the unseen, the known and the not-yet-understood.