Untitled
Julia Haller
pigment, acrylic and aluminum on mineral-based board
75.4 × 53.2 cm
2014
Acquisition 2015
Inv. No. 0290
The play between figure and background takes on irritating properties. Pale blue handwriting is visible on three, portrait-format panels. These are spidery scriptures. They interloop and become dense, stiff and cumbersome, childish and playful. The lines neither reproduce, nor create, abstract figures or signs. They are much more reminiscent of creative growths that have been brought to paper in a thoughtless state – unfocused, heedless notations. They float freely before space-less backgrounds or get lost on a polished field of eggshell grey. For all that, Julia Haller doesnʼt see them as “finger exercises.” They are much more wads and webs, hand-sized scratch marks and scores, feral and condensed information. “They are lines, that stand still.” Her “motif is not the loop” (Haller). The artist evokes Dieter Rothʼs left and right hand drawings. Indeterminacy is the theme, and the attempt to decode that which activates the works. Those that look at the three pictures from a sharp angle will see that the color is settled in notches. The wads of lines are embedded in the polished surface like meticulous inlay work. The blue script is thanks to digital transfer created by rotary cutters, for which Haller uses a mineral-based compound board. The board consists of a mixture of aluminum and acrylic. The aluminum raw material recurs on the outer edges of the pictures. The boards are only framed on three sides, as if the borders could be connected to one another. Yet the triptych remains a theoretical game, just like the nature of these notations, which are just as subtle as they are graphic.
Thomas D. Trummer, 2015 (translation: Virginia Dellenbaugh)
Continue readingExhibitions
Wallpaper #5, evn sammlung, Maria Enzersdorf, 2022
Publications
Lower Austria Contemporary 2018, St. Pölten 2018, p. 34
evn collection. 95–2015 Jubilee, Vienna 2015, p. 168–171