OSWALD OBERHUBER. UN FUTURO.

OSWALD OBERHUBER. UN FUTURO.
31.05.2019 - 27.07.2019

Opening Thursday, May 30, 6-10pm

Winter 1944, a dark night: a boy is plodding through the murky snow covering the Tyrolean Alps. He is expected at the National Socialist education camp up on the mountain, where he will be schooled in the virtues of the new society. Torn from the shelter of his family, he is numb with cold, but the system’s inexorability is an even more devastating blow. The boy almost freezes to death on his ascent, and no one helps him—far off a man lights the way with a lantern; he must follow until, finally, he reaches the camp. In the last winter of the war, everyone is on his own, facing a regime that keeps issuing orders even as it is falling apart.

After the war, he will soon feel the urge to make art spring up within him, fueled by a conviction that will inform a life’s work: “I won’t be pressed into any system ever again!” Be it a system of politics or a system of creation. Under the label “Permanent Change,” conceptual anarchy will be Oswald Oberhuber’s credo, the mainspring of an oeuvre dedicated to the persistent effort to unlearn and start afresh. One idea follows another, he creates picture upon picture, object upon object. In forms that could hardly be more diverse.

Oberhuber’s second exhibition at KOW gathers works from the seven decades of a life in which he witnessed the twists and turns of Europe’s postwar evolution. Like Oberhuber’s art, Europe is brought to life by its plurality and a sufficient degree of conceptual anarchy and permanent change. Today, as we need to take a stand against the phrases of those who hope to shackle others’ ideas, dreams, and actions, we would do well to listen to the voices of those who can share living memories before their past is nothing more than an anecdote in a text.

Text: Raphael Oberhuber / Translation: Gerrit Jackson