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1970 Wien/A - Wien/A
Elke Krystufek was born in Vienna in 1970. She studied at the Academy of Visual Arts in Vienna with Arnulf Rainer from 1988 to 1992. She currently lives in Vienna.
Even her very first public appearance - a performance entitled Aktion at the Institute for the Art of the Present in 1990 - became a scandal. After the artist had painted the room and her bare body, she cut herself with a knife. She thus introduced themes that would occupy her in the years to come in her videos, drawings, collages, paintings, installations, and performances: exhibitionism and voyeurism, works involving her own body and self-representations in different varieties of the genre of self portraiture.
The year 1992 marked her entrance into the Viennese art scene. She transferred an installation from the Franz Graf studio to the Metropol Gallery thus turning her private living and working situation into a matter of public knowledge. Soon after, using a self-directed camera, she began to create numerous video works which are kept together, as a whole, in the Generali Foundation col-lection. They include, for instance, "Vomitting/Eating" (1992), on the topic of bulimia. In a postmodern variation of the 1970s slogan, "the personal is the political," everything became grist for her mill - photographs and films of her childhood, her relationships (with her lovers) and her interest in the lives and works of other artists. Montage work is Krystufek’s most personally relevant art form - thus, for example, in the 21 photographic montages of the series "Elke Krystufek Reads Otto Weininger" (1993), she would read out quotations from "Sex and Character," set against images taken from magazines and works of her own. Viewers present at her 1994 masturbation performance at the Vienna Kunsthalle were rudely confronted with the voyeuristic element of their own sexuality. She produced her solo exhibition entitled "I Am Your Mirror" at the Vienna Secession in 1997, in a strictly serial manner, employing 50 blocks of photographs taken from her private collection. Over the past few years she has been working increasingly in the area of installation, involving combina-tions of pictures, photos, and textiles. These serve as dwelling places for mannequins functioning as alter egos for the artist. (Hemma Schmutz)
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