Friedl Kubelka vom Gröller
The Self in the Mirror of the Other.
Photographs and Films 1968–2018

Her work combines conceptual photography, avant-garde and experimental film, feminist art, and Freudian psychoanalysis.

Kubelka vom Gröller was born in London in 1946, and spent part of her childhood with her parents in East Berlin. She moved to Vienna aged eight, to a social climate that was heavily shaped by Catholicism, the patriarchy, and the repression of Austria’s share of the Nazi guilt. Kubelka vom Gröller saw photography as a way of overcoming her own deep personal experience of these social constraints. She initially set up as a freelance fashion photographer, but her artistic approach was already very evident in her early works. Since then her curiosity for the state of mind of her subjects and her way of creating intimate situations, even if her subject was a stranger she had spoken to on the street, has very much run through her entire oeuvre.

Kubelka vom Gröller‘s work includes unusual series of photographs like her Year Portraits, in which she has been recording her own “development” for more than fifty years, and her monumental One Thousand Changing Thoughts, devoted to her mother’s world and thoughts. It comprises more than a hundred short films in which the artist closes in on the mind of her subject, in particular by exploring the expressive power of the face. This work addresses themes like the question of identity, the role images appertaining to women and men, ageing, and the ways in which a person changes over time. In all of this, Kubelka vom Gröller also always involves herself, either as an object of investigation or an empathetic partner.

The intensity of Kubelka vom Gröller’s portraits derives from her empathy for the people who entrust themselves to her. Her works are characterized by great intimacy and also by unflinching frankness, sometimes challenging and going beyond the parameters of shame.

This exhibition offered an opportunity to explore the work of Kubelka vom Gröller in a comprehensive combination of photography and film. It was compiled from works in the Generali Foundation Collection, the Austrian Federal Photography Collection, and the Collection Museum der Moderne Salzburg, complemented by loans from the artist.