“No one has a language of his or her own, nor do authors. There are only the words that there are, everyone has them, and out of these words, if you assemble them the way they never have been until now, poetry is generated. This is actually the aesthetic.” – Herta Müller

 

After Martin Kippenberger and Gerhard Rühm addressed in depth the relationship of image and word in their presentations in the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien, now the tresor in the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien is showing the first solo exhibition of Herta Müller in Austria. With her word-image-collages Herta Müller takes up concrete poetry and magnifies this into a new form of the poetic art.

 

For more than thirty years Herta Müller has been preoccupied with the artistic practice of poetic collages, which she assembles out of newspaper and magazine clippings. She produced her first collages in 1989 as postcards, which she sent to friends and acquaintances when travelling. Herta Müller has continually developed the collage process since then and has remained faithful to her paper format. She is guided by the words she finds and associates her idiosyncratic idiom with the chosen typography and also the colour tones and patterns of the paper. Depending on length and content, work on the collages can last several days or even weeks.

Herta Müller has catalogued hundreds of thousands of words and ordered them in boxes and drawers. Her word-pictures evolve out of intuitive associations and graphic arrangement, forming an autonomous genre within her work – her last novel Atemschaukel (The Hunger Angel) was published in 2009. The arranging and fixing of the individual word fragments and words is a way of writing for Herta Müller that does equal justice to the word as a form of meaning and as an image.

 

Herta Müller was born in 1953 in Nițchidorf in Romania and has lived in Berlin since 1987. With her works of prose, she takes her place among the great authors on the literary scene. She received many awards for her novels, short stories and essays; in 2009 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

 

 

Curators: Bettina M. Busse and Veronika Rudorfer