So wilde Freiheit war noch nie—For Christine Lavant (group exhibition)

Opening, July 3, 2015, 7 pm
Exhibition, July 4 – August 14, 2015

Works by Werner Berg, Maria Bussmann, Peter Fritzenwallner, Bruno Gironcoli, Nilbar Güreş, Karl Karner, Maria Lassnig, Markus Proschek, Gerhard Rühm, Julia Zastava, Siegfried Zaworka

The year 2015 marks what would have been Christine Lavant’s 100th birthday. After experiencing many setbacks in her life, Lavant was the first female artist from Carinthia to achieve broad international recognition following the publication of several volumes of her poetry. In a self-written profile, she describes her path toward becoming an artist by telling of an image she observed in the mirror of the one-room home where she grew up: “Until I started school, my life played out almost exclusively in this room, and in the second enchanted room I could see in the mirror when lying on my mother’s bed. This doubling and enchantment of my poor but fervent reality is perhaps to blame for me becoming a poet.” The image in the mirror is the simplest form of representation—life is not only what it is, but also how it is represented. The images and motifs in Lavant’s work and biography are themselves equally contradictory and diverse: tradition versus modernity, aggression versus self-doubt, denying yet assuming stereotyped female roles, productivity versus the drying up of same, perfectly constructed compositions versus the impression of a medium receiving poems from a higher power.

Curated by Hemma Schmutz.