Susanne Wenger

Susanne Wenger can be considered the founder of Surrealism in Austria. Wenger’s artistic practice consists of sculptural work, oil paintings, drawings and batiks. Born in 1915 in Graz, she completed her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna briefly before the start of the Second World War. With the (easy) annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938, Wenger was subject to the Nazi occupation, which led her to become involved in active resistance. Her series Traumgesichte (Dream Visions) was produced between 1943 and 1944 during the war in Vienna. In these crayon drawings, oversized insects, a bird with a menacing gaze and a monstrous hare who appears to be obsessed by sinister forces, inhabit a nightmarish world of dream-like imagery. Alongside Wenger’s interest in expressionist and surrealist techniques, these drawings also illustrate her political stance: She spent several months in Styria’s high mountains, where she hid artists such as the popular Fantastic Realist Ernst Fuchs or Wander Bertoni, but also learned about the detentions and subsequent executions of actor Karl Drews and architect Herbert Eichholzer. After the Second World War, Wenger was co-founder of the Viennese Art Club, through which she met international artists such as Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger, Paul Klee, and Sophie Täuber-Arp. As an international movement, Surrealism often attracted protagonists with anti-fascist, communist or socialist ties and political convictions. Their vision of absolute freedom – a loaded term that was often perverted by fascist and totalitarian movements in the first half of the 20th century, just as it is today, was that life and the coexistence of people should not be determined by basic needs, such as wage labor and should not be subordinated to the construct of nation, profit or war.

In 1950, Wenger travelled to Nigeria with her then husband, where she was initiated into the Yoruba religion and the mythology of the historical Benin Empire. The artist stayed in Nigeria for over 50 years, and became a priest of the Sònpònna-cult. Living in the city of Òsogbo, she not only carried out extensive repairs of the sacred groves of the Òsun River, but also added to them with her own architecture and sculptures. Given Nigeria’s colonization by the British at the time, Wenger thus supported the pantheistic indigenous tradition of her new homeland.

As seen in the second series on display here, entitled Icons of Great Sadness, Wenger combines a formal language inspired by European modernism with imagery inspired by Nigerian culture. Like many of her Surrealist peers, Wenger used her practice to seek an expansion of reality, willing a radical change in society and a shift to the understanding of life beyond mere existence. In her works, figuration and abstraction merge and ground and subject become entangled, while background and foreground are non-existent leading to a lack of perspective where time and space seem to dissolve. As the title of the series suggests, the paintings allude to melancholy, sadness, doubt, and pain, thereby not only offering a glimpse into the artist’s inner emotional life, but also reflecting Susanne Wenger’s experience of life in an era that was full of danger and challenges.

Traumgesichte: Rote Spinnen (Dream Visions: Red Spiders), 1943 – 44
Colored pencil on paper
30,5 × 21,5 cm (framed: 51,5 × 41,5 × 5 cm)

Traumgesichte: Rote Wölfe (Dream Visions: Red Wolves), 1943 – 44
Colored pencil on paper
31 × 22 cm (framed: 51,5 × 41,5 × 5 cm)

Traumgesichte: Der Wilde Stier (Dream Visions: Wild Bull), 1943 – 44
Colored pencil on paper
31 × 22 cm (framed: 51,5 × 41,5 × 5 cm)

Traumgesichte: Das gelbe Schaf (Dream Visions: Yellow Sheep), 1943 – 44
Colored pencil on paper
31 × 22 cm (framed: 51,5 × 41,5 × 5 cm)

Traumgesichte: Vier Gebärende (Dream Visions: Four Women Giving Birth), 1943 – 44
Colored pencil on paper
30 × 21,5 cm (framed: 51,5 × 41,5 × 5 cm)

Traumgesichte: Der Rote Vogel (Dream Visions: Red Bird), 1943 – 44
Colored pencil on paper
30 × 21,5 cm (framed: 51,5 × 41,5 × 5 cm)

Traumgesichte: Der grüne Mann (Blätterkopf) (Dream Visions: Green Man (Foliate Head)), 1943 – 44
Colored pencil on paper
30 × 22 cm (framed: 51,5 × 41,5 × 5 cm)

Traumgesichte: Der Riesenhase (Dream Visions: Giant Hare), 1943 – 44
Colored pencil on paper
31 × 22 cm (framed: 51,5 × 41,5 × 5 cm)

Icons of Great Sadness: Cinetic Performance, 1994
Oil painting, plywood; metal frame by Ajibike Ogunniyi
62 × 44 cm (framed: 76 × 62 × 4,5 cm)

Icons of Great Sadness: In search of the lost Ring, 1994
Oil painting, plywood; metal frame by Ajibike Ogunniyi
38 × 27,5 cm (framed: 53 × 42 × 4,5 cm)

Icons of Great Sadness: Drowned and drunk in Homers red wine sea, 1994
Oil painting, plywood; metal frame by Ajibike Ogunniyi
33 × 61,5 cm (framed: 62 × 77 × 4,5 cm)

Icons of Great Sadness: Walt Whitmans song for the Highway, 1994
Oil painting, plywood; metal frame by Ajibike Ogunniyi
62 × 36 cm (framed: 78 × 52 × 4,5 cm)

Icons of Great Sadness: The Bavarian Tantra of my friend Achternbusch, 1993
Oil painting, plywood; metal frame by Ajibike Ogunniyi
45,7 × 50 cm (framed: 65 × 63 × 4,5 cm)

Icons of Great Sadness: The little hunn princess, 1993
Oil painting, plywood; metal frame by Ajibike Ogunniyi
45 × 46 cm (framed: 65 × 65 × 4,5 cm)

Icons of Great Sadness: Totemic Convergence, 1994
Oil painting, plywood; metal frame by Ajibike Ogunniyi
51 × 60 cm (framed: 72 × 77 × 4,5 cm)

Courtesy Susanne Wenger Foundation, Krems