VIENNA.- Galerie Hubert Winter is presenting the seventh exhibition of the Vienna-based artist Michael Höpfner (born 1972). In his new series of works – mainly characterized by drawing – Höpfner not only follows the traces of others, but above all pursues his own.
The large-format photograph Retracing Kyong Zhong Two Times in Ten Years was created with an interval of 10 years. After a two-month expedition in 2007, Höpfner returned to this place 500 km west of Lhasa, to the rocky mountain ‘Khyong Zong’, and captured the moment with his analogue camera. Back in the studio, he superimposes both negatives of this historic ritual rock from 2007 and 2017 on one another to realise that the two images are almost identical, as if hardly any time had passed between them. Höpfner thus instinctively decided to take the same point of view again, thereby undertaking his own search for traces.
It is not aesthetic thinking that takes the focus on the week-long hikes on the Chang Tang Plateau. It is the possibilities of perception, perhaps a way of being attentive (and doing later) and repeatedly putting oneself in relation to the world. To stress places, time periods and distances as well as ephemerality and at the same time connecting them photographically and graphically is Höpfner’s concern. Observational walking is the basis and the only constant in his artistic practice, an examination of nature and the environment. Within these artistic discourses, Michael Höpfner's works search for their own form, each of them maintaining a relationship of tension with Walking Art, Land Art or Walking Performance. It is indeed about a constant search and orientation, about observation and understanding and about exploring possibilities for action and experiencing.
18 Sep. 2007/ Day 28: We used ropes to lash my backpack, divided into two equally heavy sacks, onto the donkey's back and set off. A woman with a shouldered carrying structure, on which a sack of barley flour was mounted, joined us shortly after we departed. A man with some herbs dangling from a strap on his back also came along shortly after we had left the small settlement of stone houses and nomad tents on the north bank of the Tangra Tso; these three, and the donkey, walked ahead of me. I myself was staggering along, still feverish from a sunstroke. The steps of the three walkers on the sandy, dusty footpath in front of me fascinated me – as did their constant touching and scanning of boulders or small plants on the side of the path; a different relationship to the world; Besides, we never walk a straight line, we meander through the world. An organic walking line versus “A Line Made by Walking”.
21 July 2017/ Day 13: Tracing, re-drawing, re-tracing: myself, my own tracks and steps from September 28, 2007. In the evening, I reached the place where I unrolled my sleeping bag on the ground 10 years ago and slept sheltered by a rock. The reddish, weathered rocky mountain in front of me is called ‘Khyong Zong’ by the locals. Here, the human world changes nothing, everything overlaps. Which world can we see, which worlds can we remember?
