VIENNA.- Home but Not at Home is dedicated to Friedl Kubelka’s painting, which has scarcely been presented publicly until now. Internationally famous for her conceptual photographs and experimental short films, Kubelka has also been working continuously with drawing and gouache since the beginning of her artistic career around 1970s. The exhibition at the Belvedere 21 is now showing this central group of works for the first time on a larger scale – together with seven short films, some of which have yet to be released.

Friedl Kubelka (b. 1946 in London), who has called herself Friedl vom Gröller as a filmmaker since 2009, lives and works in Vienna and Paris. For more than five decades, she has been uncompromisingly engaging with all aspects of human existence in her transmedia practice. She focuses on psychological states in relation to external conditions, intrapersonal relationships and emotional and moral marginal zones. She approaches them with analytical acuity, empathy, humor and great openness and deliberately employs the qualities of various media to do so.

Stella Rollig, Director General of Belvedere: With this exhibition, we are increasing the visibility of a little- known group of works that adds crucial depth to the work of Friedl Kubelka / vom Gröller. The gouaches provide immediate, personal access to Kubelka /vom Gröller’s artistic attitude and expand our understanding of the extraordinary complexity of her oeuvres.

Curator Stefanie Reisinger: Kubelka / vom Gröller deliberately oscillates in her work between conceptual, intellectual and emotional means of expression without losing her interest in human existence and associated curiosity. Because of its immediacy and her contemplative approach in a conscious mode of abstract reproduction, her painting opens freedoms in the layering of memory, presence and idea. As in all her media and in her life, here too she is merciless, resistive and challenging.

Friedl Kubelka / vom Gröller’s gouaches and drawings, of which she has made around 150 thus far, occupy a special place in her oeuvre. Formally, they are clearly distinct from her black-and-white films and analog photographs: in intense color and rich detail, they unfold scenically condensed pictorial spaces in which different worlds of events overlap. Stylistically, they pay homage to the history of art – from the proto- Renaissance by way of Gustav Klimt and the Fantastic Realists to Frida Kahlo and Friedensreich Hundertwasser.

Her small-format works on paper address in surprisingly colorful and intimate ways such themes as life, death, love, lust, jealousy, isolation, joy and exuberance. Private events, desires, crises and dreams are translated into narrative pictorial structures in which humor and the grotesque stand alongside empathy and analytical precision.

Kubelka / vom Gröller also explores her interest in open, nonlinear narrative forms in a group of films, albeit in different forms because of the requirements of that medium. Despite their formal differences, a close thematic relationship results between the moving images and the works on paper that is explored in this exhibition. Her experimental, narrative manner is remarkable and is expressed in a diary-like form in her works on paper in particular and reveals a quality in the films that has little appreciated until now.

Co-Curator Dietmar Schwärzler: Fragmented plot arcs, contradictory angles of view and ambiguous situations characterize both her painted and moving images. Slapstick-like moments stand next to existential questions, dream logics next to analytical postulates.

The fulcrum of Kubelka / vom Gröller’s oeuvre since 1969 has been her studio on Gartengasse, which has also served as a schoolroom and residence at times. After training to be a psychotherapist and group analyst (1988–96), Kubelka / vom Gröller had her sessions here and in 1990 founded the Schule für künstlerische Photographie (School for Artistic Photography) and the Schule für unabhängigen Film (School for Independent Film) in 2006. The architecture of the exhibition was developed based on her studio and provides an atmospheric frame for its chronological sequence.

The Belvedere is the only museum in the world with a gouache by Friedl Kubelka in its collection: Neuffers Zimmer (Neuffer’s Room) (1974) is one of the artist’s earliest paintings. Its title refers to her formative exchange with Hans Neuffer, who in the early 1970s encouraged Kubelka to draw and paint in parallel with her first photographs and films.

Friedl Kubelka / Friedl vom Gröller (née Bondy) was born in London in 1946 and grew up in East Berlin and Vienna. From 1965 to 1969, she studied photography at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt in Vienna. Shortly before completing her degree, she began producing her first analog short films. In 1971, she received her master’s diploma in photography. Alongside her artistic practice, she worked as a commercial photographer, and beginning in 1977, she developed her first lectures and workshops, such as the “Course for Artistic Photography,” as part of her critical engagement with both applied and fine arts. This initiative led to the founding of the “School for Artistic Photography” at Vienna’s Gartengasse in 1990, established well before any Viennese art university had a dedicated department for photography. The school has been directed by Anja Manfredi since 2010. In 2006, Kubelka also founded the “School for Independent Film,” which has been led by Philipp Fleischmann since 2013.

Kubelka / vom Gröller’s numerous awards for her artwork include the Austrian Art Prize for Film (2016), the Austrian State Prize for Photography (2005), the Austrian Federal Recognition Award for Artistic Photography (1999), and the Austrian Federal Emerging Artist Award for Artistic Photography (1984). Friedl Kubelka / vom Gröller lives and works in Vienna and Paris.