Walter PichlerZeichnungen

“When you make a drawing and it is free of intentions, you distance yourself and at the same time become ever more exact. If you are too bold, you isolate the object you want to report on; if you are too timid, you fail to capture the object you intend to report on.” Scrupulous, precise at once, and claiming great artistic freedom for himself – this is how Walter Pichler (1936–2012) presents himself, at the same time indicating the way into his work. On the one hand there is drawing, the foundation of Pichler’s work, but above all there is space and the essence of sculpture, the most important parameters of Pichler’s work. They take shape in works on the most diverse subjects: the human being in space, the sculpture, the image of the sculpture, Pichler himself, the woman, the man, the head, the torso, the friend, the mother, the couple, the family, the child, the bed, an event, the dead man, the injured man, the wanderer, the drinker, the draughtsman, the woman keeping watch, the man who has been offended, the man standing about, a construction, a ground plan, the house, the space, the cross, an important detail, a situation of conversation. It is therefore also about the human body and the sensations produced in it by particular conditions, which become perceptible materially and mentally as states of consciousness, as Christian Reder, Pichler’s companion and one of the two authors of this volume, writes. Early on, in his early thirties, Walter Pichler was internationally recognised as an independent and explicitly experimental artist who could not be confined to any one category, and subsequently had widely noted exhibitions and participations: Museum of Modern Art (1967 and 1975), Documenta 4 (1968), Biennale in Venice (1982, most recently in 2013 in the Palazzo Enciclopedico), Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main (1987), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (1998) and MAK in Vienna (1990 and 2011). Walter Pichler is at the same time “one of those artists whose work becomes ever more enigmatic over time,” as Stephanie Weber, the book’s second author, observes – which may also have to do with the fact that, as he himself put it, he was “against ideas,” vehemently opposing any coupling of the artistic process to a purpose or an ideology.

Exhibition:
Contemporary Fine Arts CFA Berlin, 14/9 – 2/11/2013