Olga Spiegel | “Zero Gravity in the Land of Pareidolia”, Solo Exhibition, 2026

Along the way to the mature work for which she is so admired today, Olga Spiegel has had a lifetime of experiences and discovery. Primary amongst them is her involvement with visionary art traditions. There is a natural creative evolution that brings her there, what we can see at the end of her psychedelic heyday by the early Seventies as a move towards the transcendental language and surrealist inclination of Visionary Art, but certainly her decision to study directly under the tutelage of Ernst Fuchs was consequential to Speigel finding her true voice. Fuchs, who acquired a derelict villa in Hutteldorf in 1972, transforming it into an impromptu academy and eventually the Ernst Fuchs Museum, is still widely regarded as the founder and primary exponent of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism. What he introduced to so many artists, was an adaptation of old master techniques, what is called the mischtechnik, of using egg tempera to build volumetric forms and then successive layers of oil paint and resin-based glazes to create shimmering jewel-like effects. Though Speigel, a pragmatic atheist, has eschewed much of the corny spirituality associated with Visionary Art, she still carries its exquisite sense of fanciful ornamentation to her elaborate psychogeography.

While Spiegel shares affinities with Fantastic Realism, a way in which the unreality of her subjects can seem so real in their presence, there is an important distinction in that her work is not narrative per se, and her aesthetic sensibilities remain attuned to the optical forces of abstraction. That is, Olga recognizes the potent elixir that chaotic and unpredictable visual information can deliver to the imagination; a kind of trigger, or tool, for conjuring ephemeral impressions out of random patterning. Her technique relies on the psychological phenomenon, called pareidolia, of perceiving familiar forms in ambiguous or noisy fields of visual data.