Visit from Wolfgang Hollegha

Wolfgang Hollegha and his son Daniel Hollegha visited us in Birkfeld. They wanted a simple, characterful, Styrian cupboard for his 400-year-old house on the Rechberg. We found a worthy cabinet. Further communication took place by post. I put photos of simple, very old chests in the envelope – along with a letter.

I would like to use my personal contact with Wolfgang Hollegha as an opportunity to draw your attention to the current exhibition at the Neue Galerie in Graz.

Hollegha’s paintings are large-format, contain generous gestures of color and sweeping strokes. Painting meant working with an enormous physical effort. The physical, the motor skills were central. “Only when the momentum is right can I paint the picture.” The huge formats enabled him to transfer the movements of his entire body onto the canvas. “It’s about an inner logic, about movement that makes the picture a whole. Movement and thing become one. I draw in order to incorporate the thing in a certain way.” The figure is formally dissolved, the local colors disappear. The visible world of objects and bodies becomes the reality of painting.

The canvas lay on the floor. Highly concentrated, he carried out his pouring, worked with rags and sponge and set the irreversible color compositions. His paintings were created within a day. Meanwhile, Hollegha loved to listen to music by J.S. Bach. To get a view from a distance, he used a ladder construction in his 15 (!) meter high studio. He built the studio into nature and lets it in with its large windows. Nature, with its vegetative forms and organic nature, was his greatest inspiration. “I am interested in the crooked, the organic.”

The starting point of his international fame was the Galerie nächst St. Stephan, which was founded in 1954 by Monsignor Otto Mauer as a venue for the Viennese art scene of the post-war period. Hollegha, Rainer, Mikl and Prachensky were the gallery’s first group of artists.

At the end of the 1950s, the important New York art critic Clement Greenberg visited Wolfgang Hollegha in Vienna and invited him to New York to exhibit his works with American representatives of Abstract Expressionism. Hollegha could have built a global career in the USA. It was clear to him from the outset that he wanted to live in Styria.

At the beginning of the 1960s, he bought the farm on the Rechberg.

The city was too cramped for him, too cluttered with second-hand realities that complicated life, with confection, convention and pseudo-events that got in each other’s way. (from the book “Die Natur ist innen”) By the way, a fantastic book!

If Hollegha discovered a motif that interested him, it had to be preserved exactly as he saw it at that moment. He looked at it for a long time – this process could even take decades (!) – until he was ready to paint it. During this time, no one was allowed to change the motif. By looking at it for a long time, the formal relationships become apparent.

It happened that he recognized everything lying on his daughter’s desk as a motif, which meant that notebooks had to be rewritten because the arrangement was no longer allowed to be touched and was confiscated by Hollegha for an indefinite period.

Wood is a recurring motif in Hollegha’s art. “I like pieces of wood because they are unusual, always surprising, unspent.”

For me, too, wood is an unfathomable, lively, gentle material with which it is easy for me to enter into a relationship. The dialog provokes changes in perception. The object can take on the characteristics of a subject (Gabriele Posch)

For Hollegha, the process of seeing is crucial. “Abstraction begins with seeing.” Looking is a selective process. The eye quickly moves from one focus to another and focuses on different things. You only see what you focus on.

Hollegha emphasizes the entanglement between the perceiving subject and the perceived object. Through reference, a thing no longer belongs exclusively to the outside world, but also to our interior.

His wife Edda was very important in Hollegha’s life. Artistically, she had a great influence on when a work was completed and whether it was worth completing.

Wolfgang Hollegha was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, took part in international exhibitions and won prestigious international awards. He died in 2023 at the age of 94 in his house on the Rechberg. The last plans concerned the exhibition in the Neue Galerie with new and rarely seen paintings and drawings. The last paintings date from 2018 and 2019.

It is worth taking part in a guided tour by curator Günther Holler-Schuster, who knew Wolfgang Hollegha very well, curated the first exhibition on Hollegha in 2016 and tells us very impressively about the choice of motif, the drawing and painting process, the influences of science, music and poetry, the role of Edda and Hollegha’s international significance.