JUST SO STORIES 1978│2018

A project by Rosemarie Schwarzwälder

Editorial Staff: Elisabeth Madlener, Melanie Harl
Technical Support: Lukas Hagspiel
Graphic Design: Karin Plattner

There are many vectors, levels, transversals, axes, and poles that structure a gallery into a multi-dimensional field of events, such as encounters with artists; encounters with their work-spheroids, positings of thesis-like works; radical or innovative, productive “disruptions”; experiments and interpretations; connections, breaks, and reworkings – and not least, nostalgia and projections. For each work that finds its way into the gallery, there is an interpretation or a context, along with more or less personal stories, because not only do books have their own destinies (habent sua fata libelli), but so do visual art works. The gallery is more than just a place where art is shown in a white cube system; it is also the location of multifarious forms of exploration, movement, development, empathetic engagement with artists and works, and finally communicating and working with new owners, collections, and museums.
The Galerie nächst St. Stephan has a long history in which Rosemarie Schwarzwälder has been the director for forty years. This exhibition, which is neither chronological nor a survey, presents a collection of a few carefully selected works that not only reflect the gallery’s artistic program and self-definition, but also retell their unique stories. The look back is thus also a look at the emergence of meaning, revealing the interweaving of works with different personal stories as the spontaneous idea behind this exhibition.
Elisabeth von Samsonow