Kunst im öffentlichen Raum Wien (Public Art Vienna) has a long-standing collaboration with Wiener Linien. Thanks to the current expansion of the subway system, this success story has reached another high point with three new works of art for the new section of the U2 line (completion in 2028): Phil Collins won the competition for the artistic design in the Matzleinsdorfer Platz subway station, Katja Davar for the Pilgramgasse station and Maria Ziegelböck for the Neubaugasse station.

The new station connects the tenth with the fifth district of Vienna around Triester Straße: it is an important transfer station to the main railway station, four streetcar lines and the Wiener Lokalbahn. Around 50,000 people live and work in the catchment area of Matzleinsdorfer Platz. Thanks to the connection of the new U2 underground line to the S-Bahn, thousands of commuters will transfer to the subway towards the city center here every day in the future.

The artistic design is intended to create a distinctive artistic feature in the station's spatial concept that defines the space aesthetically and gives the location an unmistakable identity. Two wall surfaces with a total of approx. 100 m2 as well as the air space of the hall of the staircase building were available for the design. The competition was carried out as an invited, single-stage realization procedure.

The eight-member jury chose the design by Phil Collins on January 26, 2024.

Winning design: Phil Collins, „For Those Who / The Flock“

Collaboration, participation and the appreciation of people are the conceptual building blocks that Phil Collins emphasizes in his design for the Matzleinsdorfer Platz subway station. It is the people who give places meaning. Therefore, it is important to focus on their stories, cultures and individual experiences. Phil Collins' design has two parts: "For Those Who" is the title of two large-scale wall works in which private photos of residents of the 5th and 10th districts of Vienna adjacent to the station are combined into large-scale collages on ceramic tiles. This collective "photo album" becomes a public archive of individual and collective memories. "The Flock" is the name of a group of sculptures consisting of colorful objects suspended from the ceiling of the large entrance hall. Shaped in workshops together with the residents, they will float above people's heads like a flock of abstract doves. The plan is to work closely with the local communities and directly involve local residents and local associations and institutions.

Phil Collins focuses on people's private, everyday moments. He invites Vienna's residents to participate and creates a contemporary, site-specific portrait of society with an aesthetic that speaks to the people of the city. The design is a successful combination of narration (depictions of everyday life) and imagination (flock of birds). It bears Collins' unmistakable artistic signature, oscillating between art, social politics and pop-cultural approaches. And at the same time, it inscribes itself concretely and credibly into the process of local community building. It is a tribute to the people, to their community and, above all, to the diversity of the city. Collins not only depicts community, but also approaches people directly with the artistic process and allows them to become co-authors of the artistic work.

--- jury statement

Further competition entries

Martin Boyce, „Shapes and Sounds / Soaring and Swooping“

In his artistic work, Martin Boyce deals with patterns, language, modular systems and typographies based on them. He uses this vocabulary and alludes to the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop) to design the two long wall surfaces of the subway passage. A diagonal grid of colored, printed enamel panels suggests movement and speed similar to musical notation. By positioning black diamonds, Boyce inscribes the words "Shapes and Sounds / Soaring and Swooping" into the pattern. These pairs of words are taken from a text written by the artist for the cover of an improvised jazz album.

Liddy Scheffknecht, o.T.

Liddy Scheffknecht's designs for both locations in the station focus on the theme of time. In the light well, Scheffknecht traces the incidence of light through an imaginary elliptical mask. She maps the resulting spot of light every day over the course of a year and selects 26 positions from this, which are suspended in the air as enamel discs in shades of blue. On the two walls in the passage, Scheffknecht repeatedly writes the word "Now" in the nine most spoken languages in Vienna, as if viewed through a time lapse. The lines of the letters are hand-drawn and transferred to enamel panels using screen printing.

Christian Schwarzwald, „BEAM

Christian Schwarzwald works with the medium of drawing and sign language. He assigns one of the primary colors red, blue and yellow to each of the three areas of the station that are available for artistic designs. The other two colors are used to a lesser extent. In the entrance building, the spatial installation "Beam" filters the light from outside into the entrance hall through a sun made of yellow ropes stretched over the X-beam. Along the two wall surfaces, Schwarzwald provides graphic paintings on enamel panels: the work in red, "Trace", streams of movement drawn with an airbrush, and the work in blue, "Face", consisting of around 400 emoji-like faces.