Michaela Moscouw
The Viennese artist Michaela Moscouw (*1961) has been incessantly searching for traces of her self for over three decades.
Uncompromisingly, excessively and memorably, she circles her themes of self-staging, self-understanding, self-exposure and also self-extinction. Until the early 1980s, she painted abstract works, all of which she destroyed and filmed. With this she changed the medium - since then she works with photographic means. It is "the aestheticized body experience" that the artist is concerned with.
For her self-stagings as a radical act and obsessive expression of personal emotionality, she acts like an actress who stages herself in various roles, questioning gender-specific clichés and body images. This places her in a tradition with Valie Export, Friederike Pezold or Renate Bertlmann.
Today Michaela Moscouw lives in seclusion in Vienna. Over the last few years she has continuously destroyed her work, yet her works have survived in public and private collections.
An exhibition at Francisco Carolinum Linz gathers her thus saved heritage and gives an insight into her work from early large-format black and white self-portraits to the color paintings from the early 2000s.
