(born in Klagenfurt in 1929)
Untitled, signed, dated Hollegha 77, oil on canvas, 170 x 370 cm, framed

Provenance:
From a Viennese Collection

“When I’m in my painting, I don’t pay much attention to what I’m doing. Only after a phase in which I have made myself familiar with the picture do I see what it is all about. I’m not afraid of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the image itself is alive. I try to let it come through.”
Wolfgang Hollegha

It seems to me that it is a misunderstanding to categorise Wolfgang Hollegha as an Abstract Expressionist, to link him to painters such as Jackson Pollock and his successors – or, for instance, to de Kooning. Clement Greenberg, the famous American critic, is always invoked here with his predelection for Hollegha’s painting. Sure, when someone like Clement Greenberg is enthusiastic, that counts for something; as does being mentioned in the same breath as painters the likes of Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Francis and Morris Louis. But we want to take a closer look.

Pollock, for example, works – like Hollegha – with the canvas on the floor. Yet while Pollock, as we know from Hans Namuth’s photo series, applies, splashes his colours in a dance or incantation ritual of sorts – in a dervish-like trance, akin to a medicine man – Hollegha simply makes a painterly gesture here and there, a pouring, a wiping, which he has considered carefully and for a long time, and then – probably also in a kind of trance or incantation – suddenly executes. Both artists gather all their energies in the act of painting, deploying them in a concentrated manner, yet with the difference that the one first finds order in the progression of the work, while the other already more or less has this order, premeditated.

Peter Rosei: On Wolfgang Hollegha from: Nature is Within. Neue Galerie Graz, 2015