Helga Scholler

(1938-2012)

The Austrian painter and graphic artist Helga Scholler was born in Leoben in 1938. From 1954 to 1956 she attended painting lessons with Assunta von Arbesser. Between 1956 and 1960 Scholler absolved her studies in painting at the Graz School of Art and Crafts in the master class with Prof. Szyszkowitz. In the following four years she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna with Prof. Boeckl and Prof. Elsner. Since 1964, exhibitions of her works of art have taken place at home and abroad, including in Vienna, Graz, Innsbruck, Villach, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Lyon, Barcelona and Madrid. Her works can be found in many public and private collections in Austria, including the Albertina graphic collection and the Neue Galerie Graz.

The painterly work of Helga Scholler includes works from a period of more than 40 years and shows a range of uncompromising expressive works of all genres, which represents a further development of Austrian Expressionism of the interwar period and adds a contemporary interpretation to this style.

Color is the defining means of expression in the paintings Helga Scholler’s paintings. While duller shades and a serious basic tenor dominate her works during her time at the Academy in Vienna, the ones, she painted later in Styria and on numerous study trips, have a strong and intense coloring, which also represents her positive attitude towards life. Over the course of time, the vibrant color surfaces of the early work of the sixties give way to a stricter and more expansive image structure. But the sound of colors is also increasingly becoming a formative stylistic device in formalized composition.

In addition to numerous landscapes that emerge directly in nature or after watercolors, Helge Scholler shows a special affinity to floral still life. She reduces the reality to clear color chords which creates an order at a higher level. Depending on the degree of abstraction, the result is rather abstracting and stylized or expressive and unruly; in any case, the magic of the flowers is banned into a concise and well-composed language of form and color. Especially in the early work, there are also a number of impressive portraits and nudes, which convince through a symbiosis of expressiveness and the elegance of the colour.

Some examples of her artistic work reveal parallels to the work of her colleague Werner Augustiner, who in turn named Helga Scholler as a model for his floral still lifes. The spontaneity of the pictorial realization and the clarity and luminosity of her color spectrum give Schollers works an almost Mediterranean cheerfulness and let the rigor of a thoughtful composition fade into the background, so that the atmosphere created by color and light has priority over the accuracy of topographical mapping – as in the Tunisian watercolors of August Macke. The lyrical character of her artistic expression thus transforms the pictorial surface into a spiritual order of painted poetry.

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