(born in Klagenfurt in 1929)
Untitled, around 1990, signed Hollegha, oil on canvas, 160 x 170 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private Collection, Salzburg
purchased 2004 directly from the artist

It seems to me that it is a misunderstanding to categorise Wolfgang Hollegha as an Abstract Expressionist, to link him to painters such as Jackson Pollock and his successors – or, for instance, to de Kooning. Clement Greenberg, the famous American critic, is always invoked here with his predelection for Hollegha’s painting. Sure, when someone like Clement Greenberg is enthusiastic, that counts for something; as does being mentioned in the same breath as painters the likes of Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Francis and Morris Louis.
But we want to take a closer look. ...

Hollegha‘s imageries always reference the edges of the painting surface. I would say that they are mostly - in the European, indeed Western tradition - based on a centre that both supports the content of the picture, and also discreetly, yet emphatically, determines it: everything starts from the centre, everything flows on to it or dances around it. It is there somewhere, take a look - usually beyond the painting’s surface - in its depths. Thus, Hollegha‘s pictures elevate a very particular event from the diversity of experienced reality and appearance, and place it - using adaptation and technical mastery - into a unique, visibly organised pictorial space: it is, atmospherically, a space of dignity, of joy, even of celebration. One might speak of epiphanies in that in Hollegha‘s pictures, the material of life, cleansed and purified, appears spellbound for all eternity or held in a suspended state of luminosity…

Peter Rosei on Wolfgang Hollegha in: Die Natur ist innen / Nature is within. Der Maler/ the painter