Franz Wiegele

It is the family home of the artist Franz Wiegele (1887-1944), which to this day gives the so-called "Nötscher Kreis" its specific place of reference. And yet the artistic development of Franz Wiegele is almost monolithically individual in Austrian art history, even within the Nötsch circle. Extensive international trips to Paris, Rome, North Africa and longer stays in Switzerland have given the young artist a comprehensive picture of the dawn of modernism at the beginning of the 20th century. His artistic contacts with the progressive personalities of the Viennese scene challenged him for many years, and yet Franz Wiegele consistently went his own way. Mainly engaged in a permanent confrontation with formal questions of pictorial composition, he turned more and more to the classics of art history as a consequence, in order to nonetheless build up personal contact situations in his depictions of people again and again in a special way. The exhibition project, which also sees itself as a reaction to the current Corona situation, will refer specifically to this aspect of the "pure encounter" in its painting compositions, portraits and especially in the drawings: At a time when every human encounter is being questioned and When "social distancing" becomes the rule, Franz Wiegele's visual art, varied again and again, provides instructions and impulses for intensive human encounters.