"Hommage à Franz Kline/Aaron Siskind"

gelatin silver print

The work was created in Chicago in 1985 in a series of 9 photographs and a text by Anton Gugg. These were published as an edition the following year by the Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery in Salzburg.
Günther Selichar was on a study visit to the Art Institute of Chicago in the USA in 1984/85. The Photography Department had just been opened and was considered one of the most modern of its kind in the USA at the time. Selichar was thus able to study the extensive library and the rich collection down to the last detail. Selichar was particularly impressed at the time by a series by Aaron Siskind entitled "Jalapa (Homage to Franz Kline)" from 1973. In these works, Siskind plays with the viewer's perception of the picture plane. The cropped perspectives of the motifs make it difficult to tell right away whether the black-and-white images represent abstract paintings or graffiti-covered walls.
Siskind himself refers to his "Homage to Franz Kline" in another work, "Song of the Open Road", published in 1990. In this work, Siskind depicts the repair of cracks in the asphalt of the road. As with Selichar, a text appears with the series. Compare the series "Song of the Open Road" by Aaron Siskind in the SpallArt collection.
(Christoph Fuchs)

Günther Selichar's interest in detail and its potential for abstraction goes back to the 1980s, to the nine-part series "Hommage à Franz Kline/Aaron Siskind" (1985). Broad black brushstrokes, without regard for the edges of the sheet, seem to be primarily traces of a gestural treatment of the background, as we know it from Franz Kline. Wrong. Rather, they are based on a concrete typeface, which, similar to other series by Selichar, has been greatly enlarged. Günther Selichar had the opportunity to work on a stereomicroscope during his art history studies through a Fulbright scholarship at the Art Institute of Chicago 1984-1985. What was actually intended to check the slightest damage to historical photographs, the then 24-year-old reworked on his own account, reproducing details of the work's title written in thick black capitals, deliberately blurred. Nine cut-outs that leave the legible letter behind, push it out of the centre, fray at the edges as if the paint application were tearing off, shift the typeface into an abstract image in the manner of Kline and also of the photographer Aaron Siskind, who had also made a photographic homage to his painter friend.
(Ruth Horak from the catalogue: Günther Selichar, Werkschau XXV, Fotogalerie Wien, 2020)