Galerie Thiele, Linz, October 2014

There is something tremendously fascinating about Monika Pichler's pictures, an affective attractiveness that draws us in directly and touches us in a primal, not necessarily intellectual way. I would like to formulate a few arguments, a few thoughts about what makes Monika Pichler so unique in the way she develops her images and also -something else that is not to be neglected -in her artistic technique, screen print, which she uses in a highly contemporary and innovative way. One of the buzz words we hear constantly today is "flood of images" and many artists react to the permanent presence, the overabundance of images, by working with found images. There are many artistic positions that collect, process, and re-compose images from the Internet. That is not what Monika Pichler does. All the pictures you see here are of what the artist has seen herself, with her own eyes. She cognitively processed what she saw and captured it with her camera. That is an essential characteristic of these images, something we can sense, and they are stores of emotions -an important concept that we can use to approach them. They are autobiographical, and Monika Pichler could tell a story for every picture, where it was taken, whether in Linz or on the banks of the Danube in Urfahr, or on many of the long travels Monika Pichler has undertaken for years, all across Europe and to other continents of this world. She has a special sense for finding images, a sense for situations, surfaces, textures and colors, for meanings. She finds these images with her own eyes; although they are autobiographical, as with all good art the viewer naturally does not need to know who the depicted persons are or where these pictures were taken. Several motifs from the series of Danube pictures, which were created in Urfahr, are currently also in the museum exhibition in Nordico "On the Danube". The images have already entered a museum context.

The series originated over a decade ago. Following the great flood of 2002, the artist started taking pictures of her surroundings, the bank of the Danube in front of her house. These photos were produced as black and white prints and then colored using screen printing. These are pictures that could not have been made much later than that, because it had already been announced that the bank of the Danube would be newly constructed and regulated in the course of flood protection measures.

At this point, perhaps a word about screen printing. Depending on how you look at it, this is a relatively old or a relatively new printing technique. The first attempts go back to around 1900. Prerequisites for this technique included the invention of photography. Screen printing has been used in art roughly since the 1950s, but - as you probably know - it especially became an artistic technique of Pop Art: Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein - they created central works of their oeuvre using screen printing. So the precondition was the invention of photography, light-sensitive emulsions, stencils, screens, through-printing, which are the media components, but what is unique, appealing about this technique is the conjoining of the apparative conditions with the sensitivity of the eye and the skilled and knowing hand. We could see Monika Pichler’s use of screen-printing in conjunction with a new interest on the part of artists in techniques that were recently nearly abandoned as being obsolete, if we recall just ceramics, for instance. In Linz the ceramics class was about to be dissolved and sent into the region. Yet at the same time, leading artists such as Rosemarie Trockel and Manfred Pernice were dealing with ceramics again. Or think of wood-cut, which is celebrating a great revival with Gert & Uwe Tobias, among others. These old cultural techniques are well preserved in art, and artists purposely employ them again.

When Monika Pichler works with screen-printing, it is an entirely new approach, different from Pop Art decades ago, when the over-affirmation of print-graphic techniques was a critique of the mass production of images. For Monika Pichler it is not a critical approach, but rather a psychological one, perhaps even a philosophical one. In the exhibition you will find pictures that were taken one-to-one as photographs, then hand-colored, thus resulting in an aesthetic reminiscence of hand-colored photos and postcards. Now, however, it is not at all an old-fashioned art and there is nothing nostalgic about it, because Monika Pichler is a chronicler of contemporary life. In this exhibition, which is coherently dedicated to the theme of life by the water, it is perhaps not quite as evident as in other parts of her work, such as the pictures from Egypt with covered cars or the street scenes from Italy. But all of these are moments from the contemporary world.

The new development in Monika Pichler' work is especially interesting. Here we are standing before an image, one of the central pictures of the exhibition, and it is really a major breakthrough: “into the future”. Monika Pichler has now started collaging digital segments from different pictures on the picture area. This results in uniquely dream-like scenes. At first glance, it could even appear realistic, but a second glance already reveals that there is something wrong with the perspective, the proportions. These are montages that tell a story, and they are often dystopian stories. The utopia of the unreal has tipped into something very unsettling, something more like a nightmare, which might even signify a journey into the heart of darkness. Once you have seen these images, you see the other pictures differently again: the groups on the river bank are transformed from a light-hearted leisure society into exposed, uprooted human beings. The images are then charged with a different meaning again.

The theme of water links all the works in the exhibition. The motifs include lightness, reflections, water surfaces, water in charming close-up shots of the surfaces and remote views like the river courses and reservoirs that Monika Pichler photographed from airplanes during her travels.

A basic motif of the entire oeuvre can be described with the term farewell. The melancholy overlaying these images has something to do with the statement that every farewell is final. No moment returns, even if one returns to a situation, a person, a country, they have naturally changed.

The strength of this work is that it deals with something existential: the theme of remembrance. The ambivalence of this theme, the way we deal with remembering emotionally, is what makes it so fascinating. Memories are comforting and they are heartbreaking at the same time. They are comforting because we have them and heartbreaking because we have already had to take leave of everything we remember. That is the experience before these images: we see them in a moment when we experience again that memory carries us away from every moment at great speed, moving toward death. In the best images, though, Monika Pichler succeeds in reconciling us with this fact.

Stella Rollig, October 2014