ABOUT

Nina Schrödl is an Austrian artist and surface pattern designer based in Vienna.

Nina Schrödl works with ornament, pattern, and surface as cultural systems. Her practice investigates how decoration—often dismissed as secondary, feminine, or excessive—operates as a powerful structure that organizes space, behavior, and visibility.

Trained in business, architecture, and design, Schrödl’s work is shaped as much by lived experience as by formal education. Motherhood, in particular, becomes a critical lens: not as subject matter, but as a condition through which questions of disappearance, repetition, and spatial absorption emerge.

In Schrödl’s work, the domestic interior is not neutral. Wallpaper is not background. Ornament is not embellishment. Surfaces act as agents—quietly enforcing roles, dissolving bodies, and naturalizing invisibility. Her patterns materialize this process: women blending into rooms, identities dissolving into décor, care labor repeating endlessly without acknowledgment.

Rather than resisting ornament, Schrödl amplifies it. Through obsessive drawing, repetition, and scale shifts, she turns what was meant to recede into something that occupies space insistently. Pattern becomes a strategy of return. What disappears reasserts itself—visually, spatially, materially.

Her work is autobiographical without being private. It draws from Austrian literary traditions of the housewife figure—particularly postwar feminist writing such as Brigitte Schwaiger’s “Wie kommt das Salz ins Meer?”—and continues their unfinished inquiry in visual form. Where literature articulated disappearance through language, Schrödl translates it into surface.

Across wallpapers, textiles, furniture, porcelain, and architectural interventions, Schrödl asks a single question:

What happens when the woman who disappeared makes herself visible again—everywhere, on every surface, in every room?

Based in Vienna, Schrödl works internationally, developing a visual language that refuses silence and challenges the hierarchy between ornament and meaning, decoration and power.