»If you make a drawing and it is entirely without purpose, then you take a step back, and at the same time you become ever more precise. If you are too bold, you isolate the object you want to report on; if you are too timid, you do not capture the object it was your intention to report on.« Scrupulous, precise, yet at the same time retaining great artistic freedom for himself—this was how Walter Pichler (1936-2012) came across to people and likewise pointed the way to understanding his work. On the one hand there is the drawing, the basis of Pichler’s work, yet above all there is the space and the nature of sculpture, the most important parameters of Pichler’s work. These are given form in works on a variety of themes: the person in the space, sculpture, the depiction of sculpture, Pichler himself, woman, man, the head, the torso, the friend, the mother, the couple, the family, the child, the bed, an occurrence, death, the wounded, the wanderer, the drinker, the sketcher, the watchwoman, the insulted, the person standing around, a construction, a floor plan, the house, the room, the cross, an important detail, a conversational situation. So it’s also about the human body and its sensibilities brought about by specific circumstances, and these become materially and spiritually tangible as states of consciousness, writes Christian Reder, companion of Pichler and one of the two authors of this publication. Early on, in his early thirties, Walter Pichler was recognised internationally as an independent and explicitly experimental artist, who would not allow himself to be limited to any one area, and in the years that followed he had a number of much-noticed exhibitions and participations: at the Museum of Modern Art (1967 and 1975), at Documenta 4 (1968), at the Venice Biennale (1982, most recently in 2013 in the Palazzo Enciclopedico), at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt/Main (1987), the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (1998) and MAK in Vienna (1990 and 2011). Through these, Walter Pichler showed himself to be »one of those artists whose work becomes ever more puzzling over time«, states Stephanie Weber, the second author of this book, which may also have to do with the fact that he was, as he himself said, »anti-ideas«, and therefore vehemently opposed to a joining of the artistic process with a purpose or an ideology.

Exhibition:
CFA Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, 14/9–2/11/2013