Elfriede Trautner (1925 – 1989). Drawings and Print Graphic Works

Elfriede Trautner’s artistic oeuvre shows how she perceived and coped with the social structures in Linz of the 1960s and 1970s as a woman.
Trautner worked for thirty-five years as secretary at the Bruckner Conservatory in Linz (today the Anton Bruckner Private University). In her free time, the alumna of the Linz School of Arts and Crafts created hundreds of drypoint prints of outstanding technique.

Despite her idiosyncratic, highly contemporary image language, despite her masterly technical skills, Elfriede Trautner has remained seriously underestimated throughout her life and even up to the present. In the current revision of her work, she proves to be one of the best graphic artists in Austria of her time.

With her fine senses, the artist suffered under a feeling of exposure in a hostile (misogynist) world, progressing technification, the exploitation of nature and the alienation of human beings from themselves. In the language of Pop Art and in symbolist, realist and abstract forms of expression, the artist found highly precise and also poetic embodiments for her personal views and convictions. For Elfriede Trautner, art was life-sustaining. It provided a possibility for translating her perceptions and suffering into artistic creations. With this exhibition, Lentos pays tribute to an artist who has been unjustly forgotten.

The exhibition shows Elfriede Trautner’s early drawings and drypoint prints beginning with the 1940s up to the early 1980s. Film interviews with contemporary witnesses describe memories of Elfriede Trautner and offer insights into the art scene of Linz in the 1960s and 1970s.

Curator: Brigitte Reutner