About

Katharina Gruzei, born 1983 in Klagenfurt, lives and works in Vienna and Linz, Austria.

She is an independent artist working across photography, video, film, sound, and installation. Her practice explores societal tendencies and socio-cultural issues, ranging from gender-related themes to questions shaped by urban environments. A central focus of her work lies in feminist concerns and projects in public space, often realized in site-specific contexts.

Katharina Gruzei studied Fine Arts in the class for Experimental Audiovisual Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Art and Industrial Design Linz, Austria. She studied abroad at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) and at the Berlin University of the Arts in Katharina Sieverding's class for Visual Cultural Studies.

Her works have been shown in international exhibitions, biennials, and festivals. In 2016, she participated in the Moscow International Biennale for Young Art. In 2018, she had her first institutional solo show at the Lentos Museum of Contemporary Art in Linz and presented her works in a group exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Japan. She received the Award of the Salzburger Kunstverein and the Province of Salzburg in 2019 and had a solo show in the Cabinet of the Salzburger Kunstverein in 2020, while also participating in the exhibition “NOW. Collected” at Kunstforum in Vienna. Her monograph “Bodies of Work” was shortlisted for the German Book Awards 2019/20. In 2021, she published her long-term project “Mir Metro” about the Moscow Metro with the publisher Hatje Cantz, Berlin. In 2022, she had a one year solo show at the Museum Arbeitswelt (Museum of Work) in Steyr, Austria.

Katharina Gruzei is the recipient of numerous prizes and scholarships, such as the Theodor Körner Prize, the Ö1 Talents Award, and the Award for Best Experimental Short at the Nashville Film Festival, USA. She received the State Scholarship for Photography from the Federal Chancellery of Austria and the Margret Bilger Scholarship from the Region of Upper Austria, and she was shortlisted for the August Sander Award by the SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne. She has also received the Talent Award for Fine Arts from the Region of Upper Austria, the Award for Electronic Media, Photography, and Film from the Region of Carinthia, the Art Award of the Workers’ Union of Upper Austria, the Energie AG Award Linz, and the Forum Stipend of the University of Arts and Design Linz Alumni Forum. In 2023, she was selected as a Berlinale Talent for the Berlinale Film Festival 2024.

Katharina Gruzei realised projects in the public space in New York, Montpellier, Klagenfurt, Lunz am See, Linz, Amsterdam, Glasgow, Hamburg, and Tokyo. Furthermore she participated in the Screen City Biennial Stavanger in Norway, the Wroclaw Media Art Biennale in Poland and the Linz Triennial in Austria. She was awarded scholarships for Los Angeles, Paris, Paliano, Genova, Moscow and Tokyo.

In recent years, she has explored her interest in curating and organizing projects and panel discussions on the topic of public space, particularly focusing on unauthorized public artworks. Among these was the project “Experimental Field”in Tokyo in 2017, which was exhibited at SYP Art Gallery and accompanied by a symposium at the temple Anyo-ji in Shinjuku, Tokyo. In 2018, she organized a panel discussion and presentation on art in public space as part of her solo show “ELSEWHERE” at Galerie Freihausgasse Villach. In 2022, she organized a project on informal art in public space titled “Right Time, Right Place” in New York City. For this project, she also curated an exhibition at Mana Contemporary and held a panel discussion at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York with participating artists and Melanie Kress, Associate Curator at the High Line, New York.