pro arte Gallery, Hallein, Salzburg, Austria, June 2005

"Flowers in the Mind - What Remains" is the title of Monika Pichler's exhibition today, to which I most cordially welcome you. In a way, this presentation of the artist is also a home game, since she is originally from Hallein. At the same time, however, she has been an established part of the art scene of Linz and Upper Austria for years. Monika Pichler studied in the 1980s at what was then the Linz Art College with Fritz Riedl and Marga Persson – and has also remained associated with this institution for many years. Since 2000 she has been Assistant Professor at the Institute for Art and Design at the Linz Art University.

Attempting to name certain characteristic structures or features of Monika Pichler's work, we inevitably run into the aspects of material, identity and memory. These also define the concept of today's exhibition, which calls a memory of the grandmother to mind, in the broadest sense, with the force of the installation, the image. As with the invitation card, on which a vase that Monika Pichler received from her grandmother is photographed and subsequently formulated as an image using screenprinting, Monika Pichler's artistic work proves to be a permanent process of appropriating and transforming very personal information. Although the viewer can principally sense this, it is never intended to be obviously or blatantly apparent. What is involved here is a personal and artistic appropriation of history – as, for instance, when the photo of her grandmother and great-grandmother is transformed through screenprinting and also serves as a model for a setting, in which Monika Pichler is photographed with her daughter in a similar pose and with the same details and attributes.

What clearly has a biographical component here, though, is also what has fundamentally characterized Monika Pichler for years in the way she addresses individual and collective identity - especially from a gender-specific perspective. In highly dense series of works Monika Pichler has investigated forms of presenting and representing women, taken up role cliches and analyzed the attributes of the feminine. At the same time, there are also groups of work in which media images are pulled into the artistic work, and perhaps it is also this way of pulling in images and continuing to work with these images in series that is the moment which most significantly describes Monika Pichler's position.

As in today's exhibition, she is interested in a playful way of dealing with the information and meanings enclosed in things, images, objects, etc. A good example of this is the clock, for instance, which stands for a very particular type of old-fashioned clock - and which demonstrates this representational character all the more insistently and contemporaneously through the process of transformation into a pictorial work. This touches on a fundamental attitude, which was also to provide essential impulses for concept art in the 1960s. Think for instance of the works by Josef Kosuth, who was able to open up expansive mental spaces in this field of tension between the real object, the concept and the signified. The way Monika Pichler works here has a certain similarity to this, in that she also opens up in-between spaces - spaces in between image and reality.

The term "site-specific", which was used in the 1980s especially in the field of sculpture and stood for a special exploration of the concrete information of a place and the corresponding artistic treatment, also applies to Monika Pichler's exhibition today, to the extent that she reacts to a place that has a lot to do with her own personal identity, but in a special way with an artistic work that communicates this identity factor. At the same time, she decided to consider the overall conception - with the flowers, for instance - as an installation as well. With Monika Pichler, however, this site-specificity can also be understood in a much more fundamental way - namely as a permanent work about oneself and with a highly reflexive approach to one's own identity.

Dr. Martin Hochleitner, Director of the Upper Austrian State Gallery, Linz, June 2005