culture
Artist Isolde Maria Joham, who lives in Hainfeld (Lilienfeld district), turns 90 today, Saturday. She is best known for her monumental, hyper-realistic works from the 1980s, which are close to pop art.
With the personal “Isolde Maria Joham. A visionary rediscovered”, the Landesgalerie Niederösterreich in Krems is dedicating the most comprehensive exhibition to date to the artist and recipient of the 2021 award from the state of Lower Austria, which can be seen until October 9th.
“Like many artists of her generation, Isolde Maria Joham is overshadowed by Austrian art history. The exhibition in the Landesgalerie aims to redefine the status of her oeuvre,” say Gerda Ridler and Alexandra Schantl, the curators of the exhibition. This has obviously been achieved with this impressive retrospective, which does justice to the many facets of this rich oeuvre.
From glass art to large format pictures
Joham’s beginnings lie in glass art, as evidenced by commissioned works – for example in the Vienna Museum of Applied Art and in some churches. Joham – born on May 28, 1932 in Mürzzuschlag in Styria and living in Hainfeld since 1973 with her husband, the sculptor Gottfried Höllwarth – headed the class for glass design at the University of Applied Arts from 1972 to 1993.
Pop Art, Pikachu and Critical Perspectives
From the early 1980s he turned to painting. Her large-format pictures deal with the confrontation with the subject complex man-nature-technology. Critical perspectives often come into play here, for example in the depiction of three laboratory monkeys in a nuclear reactor. “My goal is always the same,” Joham is quoted as saying: “To give people impetus to take a critical look at our environment. I don’t want to accuse, I want to draw attention.”
The viewer should look instead of looking away, not only in art, but also in reality, which Joham finds in the form of partial blow-ups. In her later paintings, the artist deals with the dream of the artificial human being. The robot Marvin from the film novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and the cheerful pocket monster Pikachu from the Pokemon video game are often recurring motifs.
An exceptional artist in the art scene
“Isolde Joham is one of the exceptional artists of the Austrian art scene, since as a painter she followed an international, especially American and East Asian orientation,” wrote Brigitte Borchhardt-Birbaumer last year on the occasion of the presentation of the Lower Austrian Culture Prize in the field of fine arts to Isolde Maria Joham. Her large-format painting is characterized by the depiction of modern life, “special iconographies are Asian mass-produced goods such as dragons and everyday comic figures from tourism kitsch, spread via the new media,” says Borchhardt-Birbaumer.
