SUCHEN & FINDEN

26.10.2022 - 07.05.2023
Opening: 26.10.2022, 15:00

SUCHEN & FINDEN
Freiheit & Heimat

Barbara Hammer, Lore Heuermann, Markus Wilfling, Cy Twombly

curator: Irmi Horn

An exhibition in the kunstGarten and the Street Gallery. Someone can be searching for something lost, but also for something to be discovered.

Some will find the search tiresome and exhausting, others exciting, challenging and exhilarating.

How people find their path in life can be determined by the socio-political structures of their background and yet also depend on personal commitment.

Curiosity and thirst for knowledge, adaptation to changing living conditions, change of place, migration and thus communicated experiences have given rise to human civilisation and culture.

Until the First World War, many people were still on the "Walz" (tippelei, journeymen's migration). From the 16th century onwards, wandering was even a duty for many journeymen. The wanderings and the experience gained were therefore prerequisites for becoming a master craftsman. In the present day, this "experienced" mastery is built up in apprenticeships as well as in studies rather through "scholastic" practice. The closeness and habitability of the world in virtual networks remains an evolutionary transgression like a synthetic gemstone without the naturally experienced origin in the earth history of the universe.

In this country we enjoy a democratic rule of law and there are many opportunities for seeking & finding.

Some explore the world by walking, driving or flying, others use literature, the internet ... study, work scientifically, try to create and defuse problem situations, look for conflicts and their possible solutions, look for peace, look for exhilaration, look for freedom, look for home. Some are comfortable, content and do not want to know more than tradition dictates or even allows them.

Women in Afghanistan would like to know something. But they are not allowed to go to school. Eve's thirst for knowledge already led to the expulsion of people from paradise! Some want to know exactly, some are satisfied with elaborate world function stories and abstruse conspiracy theories, want to find and condemn the guilty.

But there are also other seekers: Those from war zones, areas of tyranny and drought regions who are struggling for bare survival: migrants in search of a dignified home.

Artists take different approaches and perspectives.

Barbara Hammer, for example, has embarked on a search for traces of the past and, in woodcuts and photo collages, relates past reality to the current reality of travel: travel as a search for knowledge, experience, work and a longing for faraway places in previous centuries is often in stark contrast to travel today: Pleasure, relaxation, pleasure gain or business expansion.

Lore Heuermann (- the power woman turns 85 this year) and Cy Twombly share a kind of scriptural painting that indicates that much in this world has not yet been grasped: Both create signs in precise and powerful movement, with which they construct aesthetic images whose gestures allow for mysteriously expansive emotional experiences of searching and finding.

Heuermann starts from the movement of the human being, from his posture, his expression, creates the demand of looking at and perceiving our counterpart, the human being in his physicality, which is characterised by his health, willpower, emotion, empathy or a broken resistance, resignation. A being bound up in nature. Committed to life.

Twombly, a student of the American expressionist Franz Kline and the painter and writer Robert Motherwell, was drawn to the European south, to the Old World and its mythological structures, where he could meditate on the spot on the Mediterranean light and use motifs and conditions of nature to allude to the joy and transience of life and its ambivalences. Markus Wilfling, who studied with Bruno Gironcoli at the Academy of Fine Arts and has distinguished himself in playing on specific places or spaces, presents an installation that reflects the perceptual process of searching and finding, finding the real and the fictitious, the perceived and the imagined, and opens up a discourse on this. He also exhibits a poem that is dedicated to the experienced but lost day and seeks to find its essence.

Even if there is a certain redundancy in searching and finding, every moment is a unique, new one, even a déjà vu!

The exhibition will be opened by City Councillor Dr. Günter Riegler and art historian Elisabeth Zuparic, BA on the Austrian National Day at 15:00.