ELFRIEDE MEJCHAR On Her Own

Elfriede Mejchar (1924–2020) was a major photographic artist, whose richly-varied oeuvre spans more than five decades, from the late 1940s well into the 21st century. The Viennese photographer, who only achieved recognition as an artist towards the end of her career, is now regarded as one of the most important representatives of the Austrian and the international photography scenes. May 10, 2024 marks the hundredth anniversary of her birth.

The exhibition in musa presents a broad cross-section of the work of this artistic outsider, and demonstrates how the renewal of postwar Austrian photography was almost “all her own work.” Elfriede Mejchar consciously broke away from the photographic mainstream and the reportage style that was popular at the time. Rather than searching for the so-called “decisive moment,” she approached her subjects in a strongly conceptual and serial manner. She focused not on the extraordinary but on the unspectacular and the commonplace, the everyday and the banal, repeatedly addressing these in new ways in
her photographic series.

Elfriede Mejchar revealed her hometown Vienna from the periphery and had little interest in its iconic center, which was already the subject of countless thousands of photographs. As a photographer, she was at home where the city became rural, at the meeting point between urban development zones, derelict sites, green spaces, and post-industrial
decay. In her long-term studies she documented the architectural and social textures of Vienna’s suburbs in a way that was both attentive and sober: new buildings advancing ever further onto green land, the monotony of endless arterial roads, derelict industrial complexes, market gardens and aging gasometers, run-down housing and forgotten areas of landfill and decay. For Mejchar, however, the image of the urban periphery is not gray and the wasteland and its dereliction are repeatedly brightened by moments of unsuspected beauty.