SALZBURG.- Since the late 1960s, Friedl Kubelka vom Gröller (1946 London, UK–Vienna, AT) has built an oeuvre that ties in with a wide range of practices: conceptual photography, avant-garde and experimental filmmaking, feminist art, and Freudian psychoanalysis.

These diverse interests converge in the artist’s central concern: a sustained exploration of the psychological force of the portrait. Kubelka vom Gröller’s works push out the wonted temporal bounds of photography and film to create forms of visual representation that allow us to peek behind the façades of thoroughly controlled self-projection.

Her penetrating gaze is evident in extensive photographic series such as the Day Portraits (1976), the Annual Portraits (1972–), or the Life-Portrait of Louise Anna Kubelka (1978–1996), in which the artist has recorded her own or someone else’s changing appearance over the cycle of a day, several years, or an entire lifetime. Her engagement with the potentials of portraiture is also crucial to the work on film that Kubelka vom Gröller developed in parallel with her photographic oeuvre.

The Self in the Mirror of the Other. Photographs and Films, 1968–2018 is the first solo exhibition in the series of presentations of art from the collections the museum has mounted in collaboration with the Generali Foundation since 2014, and in Friedl Kubelka vom Gröller, it showcases a leading figure in Austrian photography.




“I am extraordinarily pleased that Jürgen Tabor, curator of the Generali Foundation Collection, brings a fresh impetus to our work with this monographic exhibition and demonstrates the potential of the collections we preserve in the example of Kubelka vom Gröller’s seminal oeuvre. In the future, we will complement our series of thematic presentations, a mainstay of our exhibition programming, with similar spotlights on salient positions in our holdings—the Generali Foundation Collection, the Austrian Federal Photography Collection, and the museum’s own collections—at regular intervals,” Thorsten Sadowsky, the museum’s director, explains.

The selection on display underscores Kubelka vom Gröller’s fascination with the psychological portrait. “It is a form that has the capacity to facilitate an encounter with ourselves and with others—the more so since it entails a dedicated effort to render humans frankly, squarely, and unsparingly. Important pieces on loan from the artist and the outstanding works in the Museum der Moderne Salzburg’s own collection allow us to present this strand in her oeuvre more comprehensively than perhaps ever before,” Jürgen Tabor, curator, Generali Foundation Collection, notes.

As early as 1972, Kubelka vom Gröller, who later also trained as a psychoanalyst, identified photography and film as a language whose psychological potentials she believed had gone largely untapped. Her First Annual Portrait (1972–73), a portrait series composed of 365 photographs that established the basic pattern for many of her subsequent cycles, sought to disprove the notion that photography was a medium for the ephemeral, the photographer forever on the lookout for that one defining instant. In the artist’s photographic works and films, the portrait is harnessed as a vehicle of personal interaction and the examination of identities, of psychological dispositions, moods, and emotions. Kubelka vom Gröller herself is always involved in this process: as the object under scrutiny or as a responsive and compassionate counterpart. Her photographs and films are set apart by a provocative directness and her rejection of manipulative post-production. Her work’s focus is not on the immaculate aesthetic surface but on empathetic understanding, on forging a genuine connection, on intimacy and sincerity, up to—and sometimes beyond—the threshold of painful candor.

The artist’s name as it appears in the exhibition’s title references the two spheres in which she is active, uniting the photographer Friedl Kubelka and the filmmaker Friedl vom Gröller. The presentation pays homage to Friedl Kubelka vom Gröller not only as a pioneer of conceptual photography and experimental film, but also as one of the most remarkable Austrian artists of recent decades. The Museum der Moderne Salzburg now offers its visitors a rare opportunity to discover her oeuvre in a comprehensive survey of her work in photography and film.

Curator: Jürgen Tabor