Drawings between concrete poetry and Dadaistic abolition of limits; suggestive dream images and fictional characters: Alfons Egger’s work is distinguished by the complexity of its content and its dense use of media. In times when fine art spaces are rediscovering the potential of theatre, the moment could not be better for a re-articulation of this early approach. Since the early 1970s, the artist has been working with everyday fragments, interweaving them with components of his own biography to create a system of reference that constantly challenges the viewer in new ways—not least on account of the openness of his work.
In the Secession’s Grafisches Kabinett, Alfons Egger shows a large-scale text installation, confronting viewers with words which—deliberately or inadvertently—highlight the subtle indeterminacy characteristic of his oeuvre. From monochrome brown walls, equally monochrome brown letters 120 centimeters tall protrude 59 centimeters into the space, moving from the flatness of a work on paper into three-dimensional, sculptural space. They proclaim: “MAMA hilf MIR” (mama help me). Many and varied readings are possible: A hackneyed turn of phrase? An unrestrained artistic statement with an autobiographical element? A subtle reference to the Secession’s history as a reserve military hospital during World War II? All of these? Or something entirely different?
“The text fragments that often feature in my works are taken from everyday situations,” explains the artist: “First, the expressions and fragments of speech are taken out of their original contexts and graphically processed—only then do I transfer them into the exhibition space.” In outsize lettering, the artist demonstrates the ambiguity of human language and his own personal balancing acts between the media of drawing, installation, and theater. “In an art exhibition, the words I collect take on a quality entirely different to the one they possessed in their original context—numerous addition levels of meaning open up, which may or may not be registered by the viewer,” he continues: “In the case of ‘MAMA hilf MIR’, I don’t wish to relate it directly to myself, my own mother has nothing to do with it. Instead, the idea is to refer to situations that everyone knows from their own life.”
