GERHARD TRUMLER

The work of Gerhard Trumler, born in 1937, will be the subject of an extensive exhibition on show at the Palais Harrach from March 2001. With over 150 black-and-white photographs, it will offer a comprehensive survey of three decades of his artisitic work.

After studying photography in Munich and Vienna, Gerhard Trumler has worked as a free-lance photographer in Vienna and the Waldviertel since 1969. He is a member of the Wiener Künstlerhaus (the Künstlerhaus Association of Artists in Vienna) and has published numerous books with his photographs (for example Dream Castles, The Mühlviertel Region, The Waldviertel Region, The Ötscherland Region, Granite, Kazensilber, RockCrystal and Turmaline). Many of his works have been published in international magazines on art and culture. He has received a number of prizes andhonours for his work , among them four Official State Prizes. His photographs have entered a number of distinguished private and public collections in Austria and abroad.

Gerhard Trumler is one of those pictorial artists for whom it seems natural to make the inner life, the soul of the matter visible in their photographs. They have a poetry of simplicity because Gerhard Trumler is sparing and economical: his pictures are never overcrowded with motives. His careful choice of the view, the detail, the composition always points the viewer in a particular direction without forcing on him a single point of view. This is particularly true of his black-and-white photographs. By now, the size of the artist‘s oeuvre is almost overwhelming. The whole of Austria (and much more besides) can be found in his carefully ordered archive. People and landscapes, cultural history and geology, treasures documenting an almost lost rural way-of-life and urban environments - a chronicle of what is almost gone.

A monograph chosen from Gerhard Trumler‘s rich oeuvre of black-and-white photographs which does justice to the importance of his work will be published by Brandstätter in connection with the exhibition at the Palais Harrach.