martin sommer
EMSST Exhibition Martin Sommer Studio Tommaseo: solo exhibition by the winner of the 2025 Trieste Contemporanea Emerging Young Artist Award
curated by Alice Debianchi
inauguration Thursday 18 December at 6 pm
Martin Sommer, F.L.A.V., 2023, florecent lamp filled with gas extracted from air in a vault, 240X10X10 cm. Photo of the artist (courtesy of the artist)
Trieste Contemporanea presents EMSST Exhibition Martin Sommer Studio Tommaseo, a solo show by Martin Sommer curated by Alice Debianchi, opening Thursday 18 December 2025 at 6 pm at Studio Tommaseo. The exhibition forms part of the institution’s ongoing programme dedicated to the support of emerging artistic research in Europe and is presented within the framework of the Trieste Contemporanea Young European Emerging Artist Award (YEATCA): Martin Sommer is the recipient of the 2025 award.
Martin Sommer’s artistic practice begins with functional materials and residual elements drawn from infrastructural, administrative, and organizational systems — standardized objects and technical devices that have lost their original function yet continue to bear thier traces. Through rigorous and carefully controlled processes of transformation, the artist reconfigures these materials, making visible the historical and operational conditions that shaped their use, circulation, and eventual decommissioning.
“There is unexpected poetry in unmediated materiality: things transform, change shape and state, yet remain what they are. This is not the representation of a metaphor. It is the existence of matter in motion,” writes curator Niklas Koschel in his text, which will be published in the catalogue of the exhibition curated by Alice Debianchi.
For EMSST, Sommer presents two new works, installed in an essential installation, conceived for the Studio Tommaseo space. The exhibition reflects on the transitions between activity and inactivity, between function and loss of function, highlighting how institutional systems produce meaning through practices of organisation, measurement and archiving.
In line with the research carried out by Trieste Contemporanea, the exhibition is conceived as a device for critical observation, in which the work is not presented as an autonomous object, but as a tool capable of making the structures and boundaries of the contexts that generate it perceptible.
Martin Sommer (Graz, 1998) lives and works in Vienna. He specialized in classical sculpture and restoration at the HTBLVA Ortweinschule in Graz, and later studied “Sculpture and Space” at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. In 2023, he attended the Contemporary Art Summer School at the Royal College of Art in London. His works have been exhibited in Europe, Africa and the United States. Recently, after taking part in Galerie Krinzinger’s 2024 Artist in Residence programme, his work was presented by the Austrian gallery in the “Kabinett” section of Art Basel 2025.
The Trieste Contemporanea Young European Emerging Artist Award has been awarded every two years since 1999 to artists under the age of thirty from Central and Eastern Europe whose research has stood out for its particular significance. The award gives the artist the opportunity to conceive an original exhibition project and to document it through a publication.