curated by Francesca Gavin & Adam Nankervis

'Matelot' is a song by Noël Coward, published ten days after the end of the war in 1945. It is a bittersweet ode to a sailor: the singer mourns his departure and calls him back across the sea. From today's perspective, the queer longing in lines like 'travelled the wide world / Lips he kissed could not resist / this loving, wandering rover' is hardly to be overlooked. David Medalla was born on the Philippines three years before the song's publication. Celebrated as a child prodigy, he was already giving lectures at the university at the age of twelve. As a teenager, he experimented with multimedia painting and participatory land art. He was deeply influenced by the openly gay Arthur Rimbaud – Medalla later remarked: 'We are all his children. His life became an allegory of freedom.' In 1954, Medalla was invited to a summer camp for gifted youth in the north of New York State. However, he fled to Greenwich Village in Manhattan, where he got to know the scene there – from James Dean to Jackson Pollock. Here developed the painting practice that characterized his later work. In the following decades, he moved through Europe and established himself as an artist who resisted the limitation to a single medium: he worked with painting, collage, action, sculpture, text, publications and textiles. Medalla engaged intensively with the conceptual and material possibilities of art. Notably: he was part of two iconic exhibitions by curator Harald Szeemann – 'When Attitudes Become Form' and documenta 5 – which established much of the canon of conceptual art of the late twentieth century. He became known especially for his kinetic works, such as the foam machines like 'Cloud Canyons': foam grew up in columns and spilled over towards the viewers. The artist later cited his mother's rice pudding from his childhood on the P

curated by Francesca Gavin & Adam Nankervis takes place on 17 October 2026 at Exile.

17 October 2026

Exile · Elisabethstraße 24, 1010 Wien

This event is in the Museumsviertel neighbourhood (1st district) – known as artsy, cultural, classic.

Nearest public transport stop: Burgring (71, 1, 2, D and more), ~50 m.

Sights nearby: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Rahlstiege, Wiener Hofburg.

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