GRAZ.- Wolfgang Hollegha belongs without question to the most important Austrian artists to have succeeded on the international stage. Born in Klagenfurt in 1929, resident in Vienna and Styria (Rechberg), he is considered a pioneer of post-1945 painting in Austria. Together with Josef Mikl, Markus Prachensky and Arnulf Rainer, he formed the group around the Galerie nächst St. Stephan in Vienna in the 1960s –without doubt the location of avant-garde for a long time.

Hollegha’s success was not confined to Austria for long. He already began the steep ascent of his career in the late 1950s, which brought him into contact with such as artists as Morris Louis, Sam Francis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski or Clifford Still. Clement Greenberg recognized in Hollegha’s painting something he associated with the term ‘flatness’. The goal was a mode of painting in two-dimensionality that creates no illusion of space, concentrating purely on the visual. Logically, painting had to liberate itself from the images coming from the real world, only displaying its own medium from now on –canvas and paint. In an age of the incipient ‘explosion of the visual’ (McLuhan), Greenberg wanted to leave images of the external world to mass media, while art was to fulfil the task of bringing forth its ‘own image’. Like in the works of Morris Louis or Sam Francis, Clement Greenberg saw in Holleghaa form of painting that is aimed only at a sensory faculty, namely that of the eye. This view of things was too one-dimensional, as it was later to turn out. While one approach to Abstract Expressionism takes place through the motoric conception of the painting process, both Louis and Francis, and Hollegha too, reject outright the eruptive force of emotional unloading through painting. They preferred to reach out beyond this, to develop it further and to let the vocabulary of Abstract Expressionism flow into the freedom of each particular technique concerned. Greenberg’s requirement that all images be driven from one’s surroundings by means of the Abstract always seemed too limited to Wolfgang Hollegha. For him, the notion of the image cannot be derived wholesale from art. Imagery cannot be equated in this way with pictorial art either. Rather the question arises for Hollegha, and for others too, as to how images are transformed as soon as they have entered the context of art. In so doing he makes reference not to images from mass media, but rather to the visual in general. His concern is with the relationship between the artist and visible reality, and the manifestation thereof on canvas, and on paper.

Contrary to Greenberg’s initial assessment, Wolfgang Hollegha’s painting was always based on the perception of the representational. The painterly gesture is thus not intrinsic as in ‘Action Painting’, but rather fulfils the task of conveying subjective perceptions and feelings onto the picture and rendering them visible. In the case of Hollegha, the object –the motif –also remains broadly readable, in most cases. Hollegha is inspired by real objects: discarded children’s toys, forms from nature such as branches and roots, but items of clothing heedlessly thrown away can also attract the attention of the painter.

The definition of the angle on the object lies at the beginning of the artistic process, which in Hollegha ranges from drawing to painting. In drawing, the physical recording of the object takes place. ‘Movement is part of perception’ (Hollegha). The oversized picture surface, onto which the precisely guided, translucent paint substance is applied mostly by pouring, supports the motoric process. The object is almost completely dissolved by enlargement in the picture and is subsequently transformed to a subjective seismogram. We are facing here a quasi-analytical process within painting: after the object has been recorded physically by the painting, a dissolution of the object’s form follows through the transformation into the large format. There then follows the dismantling of the motif in paint spots and the re-configuration of a form as the equivalent of the original object. The link to the object remains intact, yet is expanded by a new, artificial reality –almost replaced.

‘The painter contributes his body,’ Paul Valéry asserts. With this he meant that it requires the physical realisation of the mental process. ‘By lending the world his body,the painter transforms the world into painting’ (Maurice Merleau-Ponty). As a result, a duality of interior and exterior develops with regard to the pictorial perception. Drawing and painting in this relationship turn into the interior of the exterior, and the exterior of the interior. In the case of Hollegha, there is the added dimension of the body motoric, too. Both the process of seeing –the eye as an instrument that generates its own movement –and the hand, through the movement of which the transformation takes place into the picture, vary and alter the seeing, thus celebrating ‘the puzzle of visibility’ (Merleau-Ponty).

Wolfgang Hollegha’s painting is therefore highly topical in times of post-modern simultaneity – both of the media and of artisticpractices. It defines a possibility of perception and of pictorial manifestation, such as is possible in the medium of painting alone. The visual experience through painting is always linked to an exclusivity for Hollegha, which extends beyond the rational, scientific insight. Science is interested in the generality, while Hollegha regards a high degree of subjectivity as self-evident for the artist. This subjectivity is immanent to the artistic process, just as it functions in the viewer.

In its presentation of the work of Wolfgang Hollegha, the Neue Galerie Graz pays tribute to an artist who belongs to counts among the most important painters of the nation in the 20th century. Like almost no other prominent Austrian artist, he has helped shape the development of painting in the international context. By not accepting Clement Greenberg’s one-dimensional view of painting and by turning towards an essentially more differentiated complexity within his art, he soon became seen as a ‘European’ painter vis-á-vis the American painters, too.

This difference can be interpreted today as the right decision on the part of the artist; after all, our concern right now is very much with the question of the picture and where the picture is created. In Hollegha’s case, too, we can say that the human body functions as it were as a medium, absorbing, then transforming and reproducing pictures.

In the exhibition Wolfgang Hollegha’s artistic path is outlined by means of central works, which have only partially or even never been exhibited in Graz. Closely linked to this, the joint presentation with former kindred spirits Morris Louis and Sam Francis enables the framework to be created that allows the true greatness of the painter Wolfgang Hollegha to be clearly visible to all.