Vienna Art WeekThe artistic work of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (1898-1944) is marked by production across media, ranging from graphics
and paintings to designs for costumes and stage sets, toys, interiors and modular furniture, through fabrics, bags, and book
covers to politically engaged art. Throughout her short career she also worked as an art teacher – a practice she pursued
even after she was deported to the concentration camp Terezín and up until her murder at Auschwitz in 1944. Dicker’s oeuvre
emerges from her on-going professional engagement with a variety of environments and collaborations. Its complexity distinguishes
her as an outstanding artist; however, she also belongs to a generation of women artists still only present at the margins
of the received history of European Modernism.
There are various reasons for Dicker’s
neglect and the prevailing reading of Dicker as merely the partner of the architect Franz Singer. Her gender, class, and ethnic
identity have played just as large a role in this process of marginalization as has the material destruction of central parts
of her rich architectural oeuvre – a destruction itself contingent upon her oppression as a socialist and her persecution
as a Jew under the rise of fascism and the National Socialist regime. Still today, the engagement with her oeuvre requires
to be continued.
The tendency of 20th-century art history to uphold a separation of genres and
of media as well as the segregation of the visual and the applied arts have certainly complicated attempts to classify and
interpret Dicker's interdisciplinary oeuvre. The transgression of established categories is already reflected in the artist’s
early work. In naming their first company “Werkstätten bildender Kunst GmbH” (Workshops for Visual Arts), Dicker and Singer
articulated an understanding of their cross-genre multimedia artistic production as visual arts and material labor for social
life as a whole. The exhibition takes up this observation. Based on works from the collection of the University of Applied
Arts Vienna, the show explores the material, formal and thematic versatility of Dicker’s artistic production and thereby aims
to deepen and differentiate the perspectives on the artist’s oeuvre. It not only addresses the artist’s diverse working methods
and their political contexts but also makes visible the intellectual and artistic milieus with which she was associated. To
this end, the exhibition sheds light on her multifaceted education at institutions such as the Wiener Graphische Versuchs-
und Lehranstalt, the Wiener Kunstgewerbeschule, and the Weimar Bauhaus. It reconstructs her diverse personal networks reaching
far beyond the art field, and traces her own engagement with contemporary developments in art and theory. Friedl Dicker-Brandeis
thus becomes visible as a figure who, despite her precarious living and production conditions as a jewish, socialist woman
from the lower middle class, elaborated versatile, unusual and resistive art works for many different communities and contexts.
The
exhibition furthermore explores a collection that includes works from all important phases of the artist’s work. It is closely
connected to the engagement of Oswald Oberhuber, who as an artist, curator and rector of the University of Applied Arts Vienna
was committed to the re-establishment of avant-garde artists and figures of the Austrian cultural landscape who had been murdered,
displaced and marginalized by fascism. He presented the artist for the first time in his exhibition Österreichs Avantgarde
1900 - 1938. Ein unbekannter Aspekt (Austrian Avant-garde 1900 - 1938. An unfamiliar aspect) at Galerie nächst St Stephan
in 1976 as well as in the show Die Vertreibung des Geistigen aus Österreich. Zur Kulturpolitik des Nationalsozialismus
in 1985. Georg Schrom and Stefanie Trauttmansdorff continued his engagement with their exhibition 2 x Bauhaus in Wien.
Franz Singer, Friedl Dicker (2 x Bauhaus in Vienna. Franz Singer, Friedl Dicker) at the former School of Applied Arts
Vienna in 1988/89.
Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Workshops for Visual Arts is related to a two-year
research project whose results will be published in English and German with de Gruyter in 2022. The monograph
Friedl Dicker-Brandeis.
Works from the Collection of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, edited by Stefanie Kitzberger, Cosima Rainer and
Linda Schädler will be presented as part of the Vienna Art Week on November 22, 2022 and can be ordered
here,
via our
e-mail address and at book shops and online worldwide.
In spring 2023, the exhibition will be shown at Graphische Sammlung ETH Zurich.
Friedl Dicker-Brandeis:
Book Presentation and Discussion
22. November 2022, 16:00 - 20:00
Vordere Zollamtsstraße 7, Auditorium,
1030 Wien
In the context of the Vienna Art Week and the exhibition Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Workshops for Visual
Arts at University Gallery Heiligenkreuzerhof, the institute Collection and Archive presents a bilingual monograph on the
artist. The book documents for the first time a body of artistic works collected at the university since the 1980s and traces
the disciplinary and thematic versatility of Dicker-Brandeis’s work.
The publication includes several essays, which situate
Friedl Dicker-Brandeis' work within social, political, and aesthetic discourses of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as shorter
texts, which explore further selected works.
The book presentation will be accompanied by statements by the authors
and two panel discussions.
Stefanie Kitzberger, Cosima Rainer, Linda Schädler (eds.)
Friedl Dicker-Brandeis.
Werke aus der Sammlung der Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien, Berlin/Boston:
De Gruyter (Edition Angewandte), 2023.
Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Works from the Collection of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Berlin/Boston:
De Gruyter
(Edition Angewandte), 2023.
With texts by Laura Egger-Karlegger, Stefanie Kitzberger, Eva Marie Klimpel, Katharina Hövelmann,
Julie M. Johnson, Bernadette Reinhold, Cosima Rainer, Robin Rehm, Christian Scherrer, Noemi Scherrer, Hamida Sivac, Daniela
Stöppel, Mark Wigley
PROGRAM
4.00-4.05 pm: Welcome, Gerald Bast, Rector University of Applied
Arts Vienna
4.05-4.10 pm: Welcome, Linda Schädler, Director Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich
4.10-4.20 pm: Welcome
and introduction, Cosima Rainer, Director Collection and Archive, University of
Applied Arts Vienna (in German)
4.20-4.30
pm: Presentation of the publication, Stefanie Kitzberger, University of Applied Arts Vienna (in
German)
Break
(10 min)
Friedl Dicker-Brandeis‘ Modernismus situieren. Künstlerische Strategien, Kontexte und Netzwerke
(in
German)
4.40-4.55 pm: Daniela Stöppel, LMU Munich
4.55-5.10 pm: Robin Rehm, ETH Zürich
5.10-5.25
pm: Hamida Sivac, University of Vienna
5.25-6.10 pm: Panel discussion with questions from the audience, moderated by
Jenni Tischer, University
of Applied Arts Vienna
Break (10 min)
Conditions and Methods
of Production and Reception. Perspectives on Gender, Class and Anti-Semitism
(in English)
6.20-6.35 pm:
Julie M. Johnson, The University of Texas, San Antonio
6.35-6.50 pm: Bernadette Reinhold, University of Applied Arts
Vienna
6.50-7.05 pm: Mark Wigley, Columbia University, GSAPP, New York
7.05-7.20 pm: Stefanie Kitzberger, University
of Applied Arts Vienna
7.20-8.05 pm: Panel discussion with questions from the audience, moderated by Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat,
University of Applied Arts Vienna
Drinks
