I first came across Jürgen’s work before I ever met him, and, interestingly, not in a gallery. He was guest chef at Wirtshaus zum dritten Tage the same weekend we were busy hatching the idea for the Schödl × Simon Kubik wine label, which you might remember from last week. Even across a dining room his paintings and drawings register immediately: semi abstract visuals that remix cartoons, popular culture and everyday references with crayon like strokes, “bearly” coloured areas.. Under his artist name MAFIA TABAK, he was born in Austria in 1990 and works from Vienna, painting graffiti since 2006 - a foundation that gave him his first visual language and a sense of risk. Painting ran in parallel from the beginning, and over the past five years the studio work has started to receive serious international attention. As he put it with a small shrug, graffiti has had to take a bit of a back seat. When galleries are asking for new work on a deadline, explaining that you need to sit by the train tracks and wait for a freight carriage you may never see is not the strongest argument. In the past, graffiti was also how he found community when travelling, a kind of unofficial network in unfamiliar places.

Meeting him later in his 6th district studio and hearing the full story made that energy make sense. He grew up near Eisenerz and the Erzberg in Styria, literally iron ore country in both name and mood, spent his childhood and teenage years as a professional snowboarder traveling the world, and when he was not on a mountain, graffiti was the only other thing that produced the same level of adrenaline. That early charge still runs through the work, even though graffiti and studio painting are now two separate worlds for him.

In the studio, everything starts slowly. Before the large canvases, there are sketchbooks and loose sheets filled with drawings like the ones above, along with around two hundred pages of writing per artwork. For him, this is a way of processing what is going on in his mind and giving it somewhere to go. The words and sketches do not necessarily appear directly on the final pieces, but they clear a path for them.

I was lucky enough to watch him paint - which looks as if the painting already exists somewhere and is simply arriving through him. Confident strokes, almost no hesitation, and a sense that he is following the work rather than trying to control it. Forms, whether figurative or abstract, are expressive and vivid, yet organised enough to stay readable. You sense his admiration for children’s drawings alongside a conscious decision to reject academic polish. There are shades of surrealism, collage like compositions, short crayon strokes and colouring that is “wrong” in exactly the right way. Crucially, he leaves space for the viewer to step in and add their own layer, ideally somewhere between awkwardness, confusion and amusement.

Today his main gallery connections and much of his artistic energy sit in Spain and Berlin, places where he feels boundaries are easier to push. Vienna, he says, can still be hesitant when something steps too far outside the norm. Yet Vienna and Austria remain his place to recharge and focus. He sells directly to locals from the studio, enjoys those conversations, and likes that the city can be a quiet base while the work travels. Sometimes, he says, it helps to have distance, to travel and overload on impressions, then come back home to process everything in one place.

Cooking has, over the past years, become a second creative track for Jürgen - not a hobby exactly, more another studio with heat and knives instead of canvas and oil sticks. For a long time it was informal: dinners at home for friends, evenings structured with the same sense of narrative as his art, humour and experimentation that runs through his paintings. Eventually word spread and it stopped being a private thing. Under the joint project Maier & Koch he began appearing in restaurant kitchens, pop ups and artist dinners, developing menus that feel as experimental as his paintings.

So what comes next? After a very full year he plans to take some quieter months to travel and recharge - rumours suggest time spent “down under”. After that, the next chapter adds altitude. Alongside his city studio, Jürgen has put in an application to take on a mountain hut. On paper it will function like a typical pit or overnight stop for hikers; in reality, “typical” will likely only apply up to a point. It will be partly a place to rest, partly a culinary laboratory, partly an alpine art studio, and occasionally a setting for special dinners and experiments that blur the line between hospitality and art project. Not a retreat from his practice, but a second base for it - one city atelier, one mountain atelier.

As always we asked how he sees the city and whether it is changing. He agrees there is a lot happening across sectors, that interesting projects and collaborations appear constantly. As I left, Mathias from POPCHOP was on his way in to see work - which is a testament to the rise of people shaking up the culinary scene here. At the same time, he added with affection, many locals are still too lazy to leave the house, even for the most interesting events. When I asked whether that included him, he laughed and admitted it usually does. Which made it all the nicer that he did come out with us last week to celebrate the Schödl × Simon Kubik label launch. For one night at least, Vienna’s legendary inertia was successfully overcome.

Ruby Arabella Wallen tracks the city’s pulse, observes its culture and characters, and works with a small circle of her personal muses to create you a weekly Sunday Dispatch - your blueprint to the week ahead in Vienna.