Laila Bachtiar

is an artist who has found her creative home in Gugging.

Thank you, dear Nina Katschnig, director of galerie gugging, for introducing me to Laila Bachtiar and I look forward to the next time we meet in Birkfeld or Gugging and either I will show you around our exhibition or you will show me around yours.

I have always been fascinated by the expression of the works of representatives of Art Brut. The pictures are an expression of a person’s innermost being. It is the directness, naivety and genuineness that touch me. I find parallels in their effect to rustic furniture.

courtesy galerie gugging

Laila Bachtiar was born into a family of musicians in Vienna in 1971. Bachtiar has exhibited autistic behavior since childhood. Her first visits to the house of artists in gugging, where she pursued her artistic vocation, began in 1990. The artist is represented by galerie gugging. Her works have been on display at museum gugging since 2012. Bakhtiar’s artistic work spans two worlds of drawing: a colorful world and a gray one, which are closely connected and have the same origin – a framework of lines. The drawn lines create fields from which a motif is composed. The lines breathe life into what is drawn. From 1990 onwards, the structures she creates are filled in with color and, from 2003 onwards, sometimes only with pencil. The artist signs her works with her first name in capital letters and adds numbers, although these do not represent a date. This is Bakhtiar’s coding, which is known only to herself and creates personal points of reference to the work.

I wish you all an open heart and moments of emotion. Merry Christmas!

 courtesy galerie gugging