FRIEDL KUBELKA

FRIEDL VOM GRÖLLER

The title of this exhibition is twofold. On the one hand, it characterizes the artist’s attempt, with the help of photography and film, to appropriate ONE authentic identity as well as the futility thereof. On the other hand, the exhibition title emphasizes that photography (FRIEDL KUBELKA) and film (FRIEDL VOM GRÖLLER), (which is greater?) are mutually dependent upon each other in the artist’s life. Both are intertwined one with the other throughout the exhibition.

In the early 1970s, FRIEDL KUBELKA gained international attention with PIN UPs, Paris and her first year’s self-portrait (Jahresselbstportrait) 1972/73. She largely avoided the art market and gallery business and for example, has not publicly shown one of her principal works, the in-365-pieces splintered mirror of the last 15 years (Jahresportraits 1997/98, 2002/03, 2007/08).

In this exhibition – FRIEDL KUBELKA<> FRIEDL VOM GRÖLLER – early photographs taken since the 1960s, including portraits of Franz West, Peter Ponger, Walter Pichler, Herman Schürrer, Peter Weibl, Susanne Widl, Reinhard Reinhard Prießnitz, friends and models will be shown together with some of her early films (1969 – 2010). Several never-before released photo series, as well as two recent years’ portraits (Jahresportraits) presented in an index-like fashion, recall the artist’s original concept: that of multipartite photographic works. 

For FRIEDL KUBELKA and FRIEDL VOM GRÖLLER the human face expresses the one and only inexhaustible source of desire. Behind the motivation to capture it in images is the full-of-suspense process of photography and filming – the theft, the seduction – as well as the contact with the model that is part of this process.