>Elke Krystufek – NAKED AND MOBILE<

sammlung essl
12 February – 27 April 2003

Krystufek creates depictions of herself in innumerable versions. For the exhibition at The Essl Collection, Elke Krystufek has also created an installation on the issue of "collecting". She combines her own art collection, comprising about 20 works by other artists, with selected pieces from her collection of clothes.

Elke Krystufek
Imperial Palace - Las Vegas (1999)
Acryl auf Leinwand
180 x 140 cm
Foto: Atelier Neumann, Wien
© Fritz Schömer Ges.m.b.H / Sammlung Essl

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The Essl Collection will host a comprehensive exhibition of the work of Austrian artist Elke Krystufek (*1970). For the first time, an overview is presented of her work from the late 1980s to the present. In recent years, her performances, photographs, videos, installations, collages and paintings have gained Elke Krystufek international recognition and a great deal of attention. Individual works have regularly been shown at major international exhibitions, most recently at the Biennale in São Paulo.

Krystufek creates depictions of herself in innumerable versions. The issues addressed concern standards and norms imposed by the family or society as well as her own views, and those of others, about identity and its socially informed determination. With her works she analyses the area between the private sphere, the individual and the public. Krystufek draws from painting and elements of popular culture, and on her own body as a topic and material for her work. She uses it to depict and explore social and cultural images. Often shocking, the nudity presented in her pictures is not designed to provoke on the surface but rather questions the levels of significance accorded to nudity by our society. Employing her own self as an object of art, the artist deliberately confronts the terror of symbols and cultural laws. In her works, Elke Krystufek is an artificial personage by the name of "Elke Krystufek". As such, she is both real and staged, totally public. Her private sphere is elusive, although everyone thinks they are seeing private elements. Elke Krystufek creates art and that is the only thing we know about her as a private individual – she is an artist by profession.
For the exhibition at The Essl Collection, Elke Krystufek has also created an installation on the issue of "collecting". She combines her own art collection, comprising about 20 works by other artists, with selected pieces from her collection of clothes. The installation will be integrated into the present permanent exhibition at The Essl Collection.

For the catalogue, which Elke Krystufek has designed together with graphic designer Alexander Rendi, she has created 180 new collages under the title of "The Athanor" (The Alchemist's Oven) which will also be presented in the exhibition.