Michel Würthle, Elfie Semotan | Ein verlorener Haufen kehrt zurück

We are very pleased to announce an extraordinary exhibition in many ways at Gallery Crone Vienna. Under the title “A Lost Bunch Returns”, Michel Würthle, the owner of the legendary “Paris Bar” in Berlin, assembles new drawings, photographs and paintings made by himself and three companioned artists.

Together with Elfie Semotan he developed the concept and the main works of the exhibition. Daniel Richter and Josef Fischnaller contribute painted and photographic interventions. The theme was and is given by Michel Würthle: A brutal and unsentimental review to Western movies and heroes of the Wild West. That genre has characterized our never ending love for America and can be helpful at the same time to understand the actual distortions there.

The main part of the exhibition comprises about 100 new ink drawings by Michel Würthle, in which he takes a journey back to his youth in Vienna in the 1950ies and 1960ies. However, the viewer won’t find any typical Viennese subjects, but cowboys, Indians, Pistoleros, Señioritas, Juanitas, Rogues, Sheriffs and Lonesome Riders. We meet John Wayne, Jack Palance, Clark Gable, Lee Van Cleef, Marlon Brando, William Holden, Robert Mitchum and Joan Crawford. We ride through the prairie, dig through a fort, get drunk in saloons, ponder at the camp fire, come to blows in dusty one-horse-towns and always pull the gun faster than the others. We experience the world, in which Würthle was a teenager with his buddies; a world that you couldn't take seriously but
also craved for it, the world of the Wild West and Indian movies, for which you had to queue in front of shabby cinemas and show a fake ID.

Würthle's drawings are accompanied by reduced, almost graphic photographs, that show brushwood, grove and branches. They allow associations with the black ink strokes of his dense sketches and patterns of lines as well as the sparsely-romantic Western subjects and Western landscapes. These outstanding pictures are created by Elfie Semotan, who is a close friend of Würthle since decades and with whom he developed the concept of the exhibition.

The artistic dialogue of Michel Würthle and Elfie Semotan is completed by two other companions of Mr. Würthle: Daniel Richter, who portrays Michel Würthle in oil, and Josef Fischnaller, who does so with photographs on baryta paper.

Michel Würthle is the owner of the famous Paris Bar in Berlin, which has been the living-room of Berlin's art and culture scene since the late 1970ies. Moreover, he has always drawn and painted, but only exhibited them on special occasions. "A Lost Bunch Returns" is such a special occasion and his first large gallery exhibition in Vienna.

Elfie Semotan is one of the most important Austrian photographers and artists. Daniel Richter is a painter and a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in
Vienna (Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Wien). Josef Fischnaller made a name for himself as an unconventional, internationally respected photographer of portraits and lives nowadays as an Austrian in Berlin, Germany.

The exhibition “A Lost Bunch Returns” is part of a double exhibition by Michel Würthle and Elfie Semotan. The second part is presented at the same time at Gallery Gabriele Senn, Schleifmühlgasse 1, 1040 Vienna, where photographs by Elfie Semotan belonging to the same work series are shown. Whereas Elfie Semotan is reacting with her photograhs to the drawings of Michel Würthle at Crone, he is reacting vice versa with his drawings to her C-Prints at Senn.

On the occasion of the exhibition “A Lost Bunch Returns” a catalogue with approx. 220 pictures will be published.