Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Werkstätten bildender Kunst

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.
 
The exhibition Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Workshops for Visual Arts is related to a two-year research project whose results will be published in the publication Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Works from the Collection of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, edited by Stefanie Kitzberger, Cosima Rainer and Linda Schädler. The book will be presented during the Vienna Art Week on November, 22, 2022 in the grand auditorium of the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
 
In spring 2023, the exhibition will be shown at the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zurich.