Since the FOTOGALERIE WIEN was under general renovation in the first half of 2006 (February to the end of August), it went on a “journey” during this time, for the Werkschau XI to the:
AKADEMIE DER BILDENDEN KÜNSTE WIEN
Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Wien
Opening hours: Tue-Sun 10.00-18.00
Eröffnung: Montag 17. Juli, 19.00
Workshop talk: 10. August, 19:00
Introductory words: Ruth Horak
sponsored by: BKA-Kunst, MA7-Kultur, Lang&Lang, Cyberlab / Cooperation partner: Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
WERKSCHAU XI is the continuation of the annual exhibition series of FOTOGALERIE WIEN, which has been held for eleven years and presents contemporary artists who have contributed significantly to the development of artistic photography and new media in Austria. So far, a cross-section of the work of Jana Wisniewski, Manfred Willmann, VALIE EXPORT, Leo Kandl, Elfriede Mejchar, Heinz Cibulka, Renate Bertlmann, Josef Wais, Friedl Kubelka and Branko Lenhart has been shown. WERKSCHAU XI is dedicated to the artist couple Horáková + Maurer (Tamara Horáková +Ewald Maurer).
Jeder, der seine Kunst liebt, sucht das Wesen ihrer Technik zu erfahren.
(Dziga Vertov)
With Tamara Horakova + Ewald Maurer, Fotogalerie Wien is now showing the 11th exhibition of works by outstanding Austrian artists whose central medium is photography. The artist couple Tamara Horakova + Ewald Maurer (both born in 1947) have chosen a selection of their works from 1996 onwards, in which their constructive working method becomes clear. Because – coming from the fine arts (both studied at the academy, where the exhibition now also takes place) they understand the (photographic) image as something to be constructed and not as a mere image aiming at an identity with its object: The image is a product of artistic dimensions – of the materials of photography (light, time, point of view) or of the process (sample strips) and of the studio (stored rolls of photographic paper, light fields on the walls or the tool computer).
Horakova + Maurer’s working method is less a reception of modernism, as has been fashionable since the 1990s (with the exception of the series around Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat), than a declaration of continuity for the autonomous status of the work of art, for self-legality, self-reference, and its own field of theory (see their publication “image:/images – Positions on Contemporary Photography” with contributions by influential theorists). The difference of the images to reality is also at the same time the demarcation to the images of the public space: her photographs unsettle the commercially trained gaze because they do not play with the subjects of desire or spectacle, although they are just as brilliant, large-format and elaborately produced. They are unsettling because they are not narrative, not symbolic, but because they are evident, literally what they are.
Horakova+Maurer’s works were most recently on view in the exhibition “Simultan – Two Collections of Austrian Photography” (Museum der Moderne, Salzburg). They have published numerous books and received the Würdigungspreis für Fotografie in 2001.