Hildegard Joos: Verschiebungen
With Verschiebungen, a series of exhibitions featuring individual phases of Hildegard Joos' work, as well as groups of works created together with her life partner Harold Joos, begins. In the early 1970s, she created those cycles of works that dealt with the theme of symmetry. Notable is the series of Balances or Verschiebungen, in which the picture surface is optically halved, with the color composition of the geometric shapes on one half mirrored on the other. In this series, an optical movement is generated, and the regularity of a uniformly ordered system is disrupted by interruptions and rhythmic displacements. The shifting of the axis of symmetry in the Verschiebungen leads to a dialogue of forms within the surface.
Hildegard Joos is considered one of the most significant artists of geometric abstraction in Austria. Her distinctive development spans from Constructivism, Concrete Art, and Op Art to Narrative Geometrisms, an individual and unique vocabulary of forms, which she developed together with her collective and life partner Harold Joos at the end of the 1970s. Subsequently, her work proved to be influential for the younger generation and led to a revision and reappraisal of the geometric language of forms. From 1940 to 1949, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (under Wilhelm Dachauer and Sergius Pauser) and attended the evening nude drawing class with Herbert Boeckl, alongside Maria Lassnig, Kiki Kogelnik, and Christa Hauer.
From 1955, she was a member of the Vienna Secession, and in 1962, she was the first female artist whose works were presented in a solo exhibition in the main hall. From the late 1950s, Joos maintained a studio in Paris and first attracted attention in 1960 with her large white compositions, precursors to the Dérogations, Balances, and Verschiebungen that emerged from the late 1960s. Joos participated in the international development of geometric abstraction and numerous exhibitions, such as the "Salon des Indépendants" and the "Salon des Réalités Nouvelles" in Paris. In 2001, she exhibited with the next generation of Austrian artists in Paris at the Salon d'Automne, including Herbert Brandl, Christian L. Attersee, Gunter Damisch, and Muntean-Rosenblum. In 2002, the exhibition "Hier ist dort" (Here is There) followed at the Vienna Secession, where works of the then 93-year-old artist were shown alongside those of 11 young artists. Numerous museums such as the Belvedere Vienna, Museum Niederösterreich, MUMOK, Albertina Museum, as well as Lentos Linz, Museum Liaunig, Artothek des Bundes, and many others dedicated solo exhibitions to Hildegard Joos and honored her work through acquisitions.
The work of Hildegard Joos marks an intersection in the tradition of geometric-constructive abstraction and the contemporary discourse of painting.
