Press kit: The World as drawn by Emmy Haesele
25.06. – 03.10.2021

Emmy Haesele (1894–1987), née Emma Helene Göhring, grew up in a solidly middle class family in Vienna. After World War I she and her husband, Hans Haesele, moved to Unken near Lofer, a small municipality in Salzburg, where Hans practised as a physician. Keenly interested in philosophy and theosophy, she began at the age of 36 to make her dreams and scenes reflecting her subconscious the subjects of drawings. Shortly afterwards, a friend of the family, the German writer Oscar A. H. Schmitz, arrranged for her to meet Alfred Kubin. This marked the beginning of her intensive relationship with the “magician of Zwickledt”, which lasted several years and was to have a profound effect on her style of drawing. Highly sensitive, Haesele introduced into her drawings coded figures reminiscent of fairy tales to grapple with the gender specific conflicts that preoccupied her. Animus and Anima are given key roles in the depiction of the anxieties and hardships she was experiencing. With help from C. G. Jung’s philosophy of archetypes she sought to come to terms in her work with tragic twists of fate that happened to her during World War II. In the 1950s and ’60s the figure of the genial harlequin strikes a conciliatory note in her work.

The exhibition allows a deeply moving insight in the development of a woman who, after a long series of fateful trials and tribulations, made peace with her life at last.