Mary’s Cherry Pie
2025
This work presents a surreal narrative, weaving iconic imagery with contemporary references. The series explores the tensions between societal expectations of women and personal desire, delving into themes of identity, morality, and the complexities of human experience.
At its center, Mary with the Christ Child smokes on the beach, a provocative gesture that deliberately subverts conventional expectations of women. The series unfolds through layered symbolism: a surreal mouth with a bent tongue and a worm evokes seduction, transience, and subtle corporeal discomfort, while a wide-open eye conveys alienation and the search for identity.
The cherry in the womb carries a dual meaning, embodying both innocence and purity alongside passion and fertility, reflecting the intricate expectations placed on women.
The burning sausage in the hand serves as an ironic allegory of consumption, temptation, and sexuality – simultaneously banal and provocative – highlighting the boundaries of hidden desires.
Through its provocative imagery, the work initiates a dialogue on the tensions between inner longing and external expectation. It invites viewers to consider how these forces shape both identity and desire.
Parallel Vienna
10 - 14/09/2025
Artist Statement
Pavillon 7
Rooms 7/307 & 07/310
Otto-Wagner-Areal
Baumgartnerhöhe 1
1140 Vienna
Room 7/307
‘Mary’s Cherry Pie’ presents a surreal narrative created with artificial intelligence, blending iconic imagery with contemporary references. At its center, Mary with the Christ Child smokes on the beach, while surrounding symbols — a twisted mouth, a wide-open eye, a cherry in the womb, and a burning sausage — mix irony, provocation, and hidden desire.
The series explores the tension between societal expectations of women and personal desire, delving into themes of identity, morality, and the complexities of human experience.
Opposite the series stands the earlier work The Chick (2023), which confronts the viewer with a scrutinizing, judgmental gaze.
The video works ‘Hungry Eyes’ evoke paranoia, surveillance, and a subtle sense of disgust, intensifying the tension within the historic Otto Wagner site, a former psychiatric hospital, and emphasizing themes of control, judgment, and the discomfort of being watched.
Parallel Vienna
10 - 14/09/2025
Artist Statement
Pavillon 7
Rooms 7/307 & 07/310
Otto-Wagner-Areal
Baumgartnerhöhe 1
1140 Vienna
Room 10/307
In the second room, projections and video installations expand the work, extending its conceptual arc and incorporating archival material from the artist. Mirrors throughout the space create a maze-like effect, making perception and reflection tangible while symbolizing self-awareness, the layered complexity of identity, and the constant societal gaze.
Through its imagery and installations, the work encourages viewers to reconsider modern sins in relation to identity, desire, and societal expectation.
Enter Art Fair
28-31/08/2025
Video ‘Hybrids’ with Karl Karner
Booth 70
Galerie Kandlhofer
Lokomotivværkstedet
Otto Busses Vej 5A
2450 Copenhagen SV
Denmark
Enter Art Fair is Scandinavia’s largest international art fair and a nexus of creative and commercial exchanges.
The annual four-day event takes place in Copenhagen, and brings the global art community together to discover
and acquire the best of contemporary art from the world’s leading galleries and their artists.
Hybrids
2025
Hybrids, 2025, 1:01 min
Single-channel video, color
A collaboration with Karl Karner
In this project Crystin Moritz merges her own visual language with Karl Karner’s drawings, texts, and sculptures.
Hybrid figures emerge, oscillating between human and nature. A fusion of body and environment, an almost alien scene to our present, exploring the boundaries between the organic and the artificial world.
Through their shifting forms, the figures reflect themes of time, impermanence, and transformation, existing as transitional beings between states.
Designforum, MQ
27/06/ - 20/09/2025
AOON exhibition
Designforum Wien
MuseumsQuartier
Curated by
Ulrike Tschabitzer-Handler
The exhibition explores the creative collaboration between humans and machines, viewing AI not merely as a tool but as a co-creator. It showcases how artificial intelligence enables new and innovative forms of expression in fashion, design, and communication, pushing the boundaries of creativity. Featuring works by international artists, the exhibition makes the transformative potential of AI as an extension of human imagination tangible.
Allan Berger (AT)
Ana Rajcevic (UK)
Claire Silver (US)
Cris Marsay (UK)
Crystin Moritz (AT)
Daniel Gebhart de Koekkoek (AT)
Flora Miranda (AT)
Grit Wolany (CH)
Iris van Herpen (NL)
Jeannette Bergen (DE)
José Sobral (PT)
Lazoschmidl (SE)
Lulu Li (SE)
Marc Tudisco (DE)
Marco Cavazzana (SE)
Marlon Ferry (DE)
Mary-Ann Weber (DE)
Oliver Rust (CH)
Paola Rocchetti (IT)
Philipp Köll (AT)
Saadettin Konukseven (TR)
Silvia Badalotti (IT)
Sybille de Saint Louvent (FR)
Synchrodogs (UA)
The Fabricant (NL)
Yasmin Gross (FR)
Yulia Reznikov (DE)
Selene Atomica
2025
Selene Atomica, 2025, 1:13 min
mixed media video (photography & AI)
Selene Atomica explores the intersection of analog photography and AI.
Built around a single Polaroid as its origin point, the video unfolds as a visual experiment on human nature, identity, and society. Inspired by Dalí’s Leda Atomica, the piece moves through beauty and distortion—deconstructing and reshaping an image into a surreal experience.
Inferna
2025
Inspired by „Witch Doing her Toilette on Walpurgis Night” (Hexe bei der Toilette für die Walpurgisnacht“) by Teresa Feodorowna Ries.
The sculpture “Witch Doing her Toilette on Walpurgis Night” was created in 1895 by Russian-Jewish sculptor Teresa Feodorowna Ries, who was only 21 years old at the time.
Depicting a nude female figure grooming herself with a broomstick at her feet, the work caused a scandal when first exhibited in Vienna in 1896, both for its provocative subject and its female creator.
Damaged during the 20th century, the sculpture has since been restored and is now part of Wien museum’s permanent collection, representing an important contribution by women artists to Viennese Modernism.
(K)Limax
2024
(K)Limax employs AI to generate still lifes in the tradition of ikebana, yet systematically destabilizes the expected harmony of this aesthetic canon. By introducing smartphones, slugs, insects, and broken eggs into the arrangements, the images enact a form of techno-organic hybridity: an unsettling convergence of digital apparatus, non-human life, and cultural ritual.
In this sense, the work can be read as a post-digital allegory. The ikebana reference—historically bound to ideas of balance, transience, and spiritual attention—collides with motifs of consumption, intrusion, and decay. The smartphone, a tool of permanent connectivity and surveillance, enters the tableau as both fetish and contaminant; the slug and insect, often considered abject, destabilize the ornamental order by foregrounding material vulnerability and entropy. The broken egg, long a symbol of fertility, fragility, and potential, introduces a further dimension of rupture: it marks both the possibility of renewal and the inevitability of loss.
These compositions articulate the condition of a present in which nature and technology no longer form distinct categories but oscillate within a shared ecology of images, affects, and dependencies. The still lifes are not only meditations on beauty but also speculative sites where the boundaries of the organic and the artificial are continuously negotiated.
Utopia
28/09/2024
KSlowenien, the new project by Karl Karner - an old farmhouse in the middle of nature, between ponds, meadows and fields. On 28 September, this place will be opened up to the public for the first time and will be the setting for an exhibition intervention:
Utopia
KSlowenien
Grad 56, 9264 Grad
KS Contemporary
Artists:
Theresa Ulrike
Moritz Führer
Crystin Moritz
Katrina Schneider
curated by Julia Aldrian