Brief Biography & Artistic Journey

Born 1964 in Vienna, Austria. Lives in Vienna and spends part of the year in Italy.

Barbara Filips is an Austrian photographer whose work is shaped by observation, intuition, and a refined sensitivity to atmosphere. Her practice centers on places, journeys, and those unexpected moments in which reality shifts into a new visual language. Her images often emerge from travel, chance encounters, and the poetic tension between documentary perception and imaginative reconstruction.

Before devoting herself fully to photography, Filips studied Italian and Spanish, worked in cultural management, and founded the artist agency babmusic artist management gmbH. From 2012 to 2015, she studied applied and artistic photography at the Prague Photo School Austria and completed her diploma in 2016. Since then, she has worked as an independent artistic photographer.

Her visual language is shaped by a continual search for the unfamiliar. Travels to Kyoto, Las Vegas, Abu Dhabi, Marrakesh, and Venice have inspired photographic series that condense fleeting impressions into layered visual worlds. Filips combines real motifs with surreal undertones, creating works of mysterious, playful, ironic, and at times quietly unsettling presence. A distinctive sense of color, composition, and narrative openness characterizes her oeuvre.

Her artistic practice also extends across disciplines. In 2019, her series Ukiyo-e – from the streets of Japan served as the visual foundation for a fashion collection by designer Vivi van Gibson. In 2020, the Las Vegas novella Wenn Rot kommt, developed together with writer Petra Piuk, was published by Kremayr & Scheriau. Since 2019, Barbara Filips has been a full member of Künstlerhaus, the Society of Austrian Artists in Vienna.

Her works have been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Austria and abroad.