Oswald Oberhuber

Critical text

Oswald Oberhuber (1931, Meran – 2020, Vienna)’s maxim—and the guiding idea of his practice—was the embrace of a simple principle: the principle of “permanent change”. “Permanent change” meant the right to the kind of anarchy that sees no reason and no occasion to follow people, ideas, and institutions that were not after his own mind and heart. His multifaced oeuvre spans from the 1950s to the late 2010s. Most of his artworks have a certain humour and almost aimlessness, they seem to be in a happy-go-lucky mood, while dealing with history, the everyday life and all the questions that artists faced throughout Modernism. Oberhuber takes a close look and sees things in contexts. He rejects a logic of production that confines itself to the individual work, relates both his and other artists’ works to each other, and thus develops an implicit criticism of aesthetic and institutional forms of artistic practice. In the early 1970s, he started publishing the paper Galerie nächst St. Stephan. He used it for documenting the gallery’s exhibition activities and for presenting specific curatorial approaches. By assembling drawings by Cy Twombly, Hanne Darboven, Wols, and himself, for example, Oberhuber tried to convey the nature of rhythmicized automatic writing and drawing in its different artistic forms.

Text by Bettina Steinbrügge