A painting depends, quite literally, on what holds it: nails, screws, and staples. The stretched canvas is not a cover, but a surface structured by attachment, in tension with its own history, format, and genre. When David Gruber contacted different eBay sellers for (more) pictures of the Hellraiser masks he came across while working on his show Persona at New Jörg last year, what he requested were photos of their insides — showing a rather formless rubber shape: a white, ghoulish skin held together by a diagram of nails with their sharp ends exposed. In the Hellraiser movies, these belong to the Cenobites, a group of extra-dimensional beings whose mutilated faces bear the marks of nails and scarification, a sign of a ritualised transformation, in which pain and pleasure have become indistinguishable.

What matters to Gruber is not the mask as an object, nor the cult status that the 1987 movie has garnered, along with all subsequent merchandise, but a fixation on this inner skin, the point where a surface is constructed. As if undecided between interior and exterior, convex and concave, reflection and introspection, the bluish-white close-ups that these paintings depict are, at first, terrifying. This is not just because of their otherworldly appearance, but because the features of the faces are not themselves inverted. Some, such as Untitled (Animation) and Untitled (Pointillism), show a pair of eyes and a mouth; two others, both Untitled, show only a single ear. The masks in the paintings curl towards the edges of the canvas, the nails protruding, as if trying to escape their narrow rectangular confines. They remind the viewer of a web, a flatfish caught in a net, its eyes migrating; of CGI coordinates; and ultimately, of the contemporary meaning of the word mask in photo-editing software.

The works in Gruber’s first solo exhibition at EXILE, all from 2026, are generally without title; seven are Untitled; three of them carry subtitles in brackets: Untitled (Animation), Untitled (Pointillism), and Reverse Schemata (Opacity), respectively, as if describing procedures rather than images, making them behave more like instructions or residual traces of how the works came into being, or of the framework behind them. With their whitish, pinkish, and bluish masks, scaled slightly above human size, they act as negatives, almost transparencies of what painting can be.

The show opens with Bianco San Giovanni, situated downstairs as one enters the gallery, and Reverse Schemata (Opacity), upstairs against the back wall of the second room, Verlautbarung is framed by two nearly monochromatic works that shift attention away from painting as image; a word that, in the context of Gruber’s mask paintings, instantly brings to mind the distance, and the difference, between the Latin word imago ‘death mask’ and persona ‘theater mask’.

Bianco San Giovanni is an explosion of matte, sometimes crackling white paint, whose title refers to the Renaissance pigment historically used as an underlayer in the vivid rendering of flesh. The corners of this blurred shape (which can look like something of a skull when seen from above) are deliberately left exposed, baby blue. These corners, as if unpainted or abandoned, already introduce the blue of Reverse Schemata (Opacity), where it is the printed, not painted, underlayer that matters.

Reverse Schemata (Opacity) is not a painting per se, but consists of two stretches of blueback offset paper, unevenly cut at top and bottom, pasted front side down to the wall. Wider than long, it reworks a three-part vertical version exhibited in Gruber’s Persona.

Each of these bookends intensifies this idea of a field of possibilities where painting can expand into a statement, an enunciation, or even a press release, which is one of the possible translations of the outdated German word Verlautbarung, to the point where the exhibition text by art historian David Misteli could become part of the exhibition itself.

Without choosing between the two registers —back and front, hardware and procedure, painting and proclamation —a shift occurs, turning our attention away from the image and content toward their construction and the medium’s confines. Gruber’s work begins to appear more as an arrangement of the conditions that hold the work itself in place than an image to be interpreted, let alone taken at face value. The laut of Verlautbarung confronts the viewer with the paintings’ muteness, their inability to be loud: the simple fact that they cannot speak for themselves.

And if the material dependency of painting itself, hanging on nails, carries an unavoidable pictorial association with Jesus on the cross. The ten works in Verlautbarung are testament to a transformation. Looking closely, I saw the mask paintings turn from the angst-ridden, doomed Hellraiser figures into a kind of Vanitas painting with a letter rack and a skull, the “announcement” of the title pinned down, strapped to the board — as we know them from Dutch and Flemish trompe-l’œil painting.[1]

What Gruber’s Verlautbarung shows you, then, is how what holds painting together is not only what you see, but a system of “fixations” that remains just outside the frame. The nail is a metaphor for penetration and support; it is also a literal point of attachment, of pain-ting — less as a tool than a relationship.

[1] In turn the draped and folded curtain in Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts’ Letter Rack with an Hourglass, Razor and Scissors (c. 1664, collection of the Museum voor Schone Kunsten Ghent) can now also be seen to gain mask-like qualities.

Robin Waart is an artist and writer

edited by Punch Viratmalee

David Gruber – "Verlautbarung"

EXILE, Vienna

(22 May - extended until 4 July 2026)