| | | | | | | | Heidi Harsieber: Harmonie du soir, 1982
© Heidi Harsieber | | | | | | Hand.Camera | | | | ... until 19 March 2023 | | | | | | Francisco Carolinum Linz Museumstr. 14, A-4020 Linz
T +43 (0)732-7720 522 00
www.ooekultur.at
Tue-Sun 10am-6pm | |
| | | | | | | | | Heidi Harsieber: X-Ray, 2001
© Heidi Harsieber | | | | | | Heidi Harsieber (b. 1948) first apprenticed as a photographer and then took courses at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt in Vienna. When she embarked on her career, she was the youngest professional photographer in Austria. In addition to doing commercial photography for tableware producers and industrial enterprises, she began to develop an independent body of artistic work as early as the 1960s and early 1970s. From 1977 to 2001, she taught at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
Harsieber likes to describe herself as "incorrigibly hands-on," and her photographs attest to her technical savvy in everything from exposure to finishing. She has experimented with Polaroids but for the most part works in analogue mode, often with a medium-format camera, enlarging and developing her black-and-white images herself. | | | | | | | | | Heidi Harsieber: Hoxton, 2021
© Heidi Harsieber | | | | | | Over the years, Harsieber’s art has increasingly focused on themes involving individuals and the human body. Her photographs revolve around the human condition: beauty, tenderness, desire, eroticism, and love, but also pain, old age, loneliness, and death. She rose to fame with portraits of her fellow artists, but it was the staging of her own body in performative self-portraits that established Harsieber as part of the international feminist avant-garde of the 1970s.
The retrospective at the Francisco Carolinum focuses on Harsieber’s self-portraits as well as early photographs from the Epitaph for Werner series. In the early 1970s, the artist was already setting her body in relation to space in a series of nudes. These images renegotiate the classic definition of the self-portrait as the artist explores her own identity. In the 1980s, Harsieber's performative approach broke completely with culturally entrenched image schemes and the usual repertoire of gestures and poses familiar from portrait photography. Her images are autobiographical, but they evoke a state of mind, a feeling, rather than an inventory of exterior details. The artist perfected her approach in her self-portraits from the 2000s. Accentuating the performative moment, she works with timers and with calculated blurring within the fixed image frame, allowing an element of chance to play along. | | | | | | | | | Heidi Harsieber: Aus der Serie "Im Rathaus", 2001
© Heidi Harsieber | | | | | | In more than 30 years, not only Harsieber’s working method has changed but also her body. In a series of unsparing photographs, the artist lays bare the traces left by illness and aging. Zur Klärung der Situation (To Clarify the Situation) is the telling title of a series of out-of-focus erotic self-portraits taken in front of the tiled walls of her bathroom, dating from the same period. The title is programmatic: Photography becomes here a means of self-assurance and not least a testimony to self-empowerment.
Heidi Harsieber is known for her unique eye and a keen sensitivity that allows her to capture rare and intimate moments with her camera like no other.
The catalogue "HEIDI HARSIEBER – Das ist – über die Jahre" (German/English, SCHLEBRÜGGE.EDITOR, 2021) is available for €28 in the museum shop and on www.ooekultur.at. The book provides a thorough overview of Harsieber's entire oeuvre. | | | | | | | | | Heidi Harsieber: Das Ballkleid, 2003
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© 13 Jan 2023 photography now UG (haftungsbeschränkt) i.G.
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