For last drop Magdalena Los has produced a new series of paintings that continues her ongoing inquiry into the relation between art and labor. The works situate the place of art in a world of transactions, and respond to their own situation with mixed emotions. You are looking at the different moods of a lemon, and they are de-pressing indeed.
The “untitles” that Los chose for these works—reaching from Tugend (virtue) to Unsterblichkeit (immortality)—allude to the fact that lemons throughout history have always held many promises. These “golden apples”—fruits of love, fertility and eternal life—were once given to Zeus and Hera as a wedding gift, to be guarded by the evening nymphs, Hesperides.
In worldlier contexts, too, the lemon became an object of luxury, particularly in areas where it was difficult to grow: it appears in roughly half of Dutch still-life paintings, with artists not only showcasing their technical proficiency with curls of peel, but also offering reminders of vanitas through drought and decay. Paintings that encode the “spirit of capitalism”: to squeeze every drop out of life, it seems, is to practice frugality in the face of abundance—to secure the surplus lest it goes to waste. (Franca Zitta & Mari van Stokkum)

The works by Magdalena Los in the exhibition "last drop" are digital paintings on silk created on the iPad. Using reflexive printing, a textile printing process that penetrates very deeply into the fibres and thus creates a special depth of colour, the motifs are printed onto the silk satin and laminated onto screen-printing frames that have been misappropriated. As in the production of the silk-screen nets, the fabric is visibly coated with glue on the front of the aluminium frame, giving each painting a visual frame. Digital painting is a technique frequently practised by the artist; each digital motif is simply printed and elaborated, each work is unique. In comparison to analogue painting, the process of selecting the final image format and technique takes place only after the actual act of painting, which in the case of the digital paintings happens on the iPad.
The different grimaces are those individual faces that Magdalena Los reproduces in the individual columns of the lemon in the large-format work "Lemon Problems" (2023, 231 x 112 cm).
Several such grimace pictures, outlined in yellow or red, were exhibited in the exhibition. The red-edged works are those that Los created as an edition for [tart vienna]. They differ from the other works only in the red pigment that was added to the adhesive. Here Los alludes to the arbitrary use of the term "edition" on the art market, which is used on the one hand to designate artworks in higher editions (multiples). And on the other hand, it is freely used as a marketing term to confer a special meaning on a work of art and, in the many cases, to offer it at a special price.