Melanie Thöni

With her art,  Melanie Thöni mediates between a generation of young artists who are redefining color and form and a wealth of subjects that reaches deep into northern Alpine art history. Her works play with the prejudiced view that one sometimes has of everything rural. They tell of the mythical veil that surrounds every gesture in everyday life and only becomes visible when you take a step back. Her characters are women who use this short distance to retell the story of their origins in Tyrol, their habits and customs. Thöni always negotiates the possibility of saving a rural aesthetic and at the same time turning it into a feminist one. Melanie Thöni is visibly unimpressed by any conservative transfiguration, such as Heidegger formulated in his ovation to the farmer's shoe in The Origin of the Work of Art. Working with Alpine clichés, which often seem strange but can also be true, always guides her work. Without burying the art-historical genesis of its visual language, an image is polished up here that enables approaches to the discourses of contemporary art that take place in urban centers far away from pasture fences and do without terms such as “hocka lossa” (let it sit).

In Thöni's work, however, images of farmers, their livestock and the Alpine region by no means give the impression of an aestheticization of the pre-modern, but rather show the extent to which practices, customs and peculiarities exist here that must be taken into account in any transformation. It is works like “swamped”, “huam kema” or “bauer unser” in which the relationship between form and content undergoes a reconciliatory redefinition, and especially the latter, through the bright coloring typical of Thöni, takes on the appearance of a mystified unknown. Through her gaze, she allows the viewer less to think of something that has passed and more to reflect on something that has always been there. These can be decorated calves, carefully decorated tiled stoves, or the dusty loden hat from the attic. If you use her imagery, you quickly become aware that the complexity of the present does not stop at what is too often and incorrectly glorified as simple or natural. If one recognizes these contradictions, for example those between a deeply patriarchal farming cosmos and the consumer needs of an urban generation of globalization critics, they can be resolved productively. Thöni achieves this by inheriting many of her subjects from Defregger, Egger-Lienz and Walde and making them fruitful for a feminist reassessment and thus bringing historical genres to life. In particular, the stereotyped loading of traditional gender roles in manual, physical work such as that required by agriculture is relegated to ideological appearance in Thöni's oeuvre. The emphasis on the distinctively feminine in the customs and practices of the Alpine landscape is therefore less an imaginative painting of utopias than a way of paying respect in art to all those who tackle things every day and find no echo in the narrative of great, strong men.

Melanie Thöni shows that art history can also be written by women, as Linda Nochlin put it in 1971, by borrowing from Austrian artists such as Xenia Hausner or Valie Export, not by adopting their formal language, but by incorporating herself as a subject Inscribe picture. Without essentialist chimeras, the interweaving of her own fate with that of other women is artistically represented. Aesthetically, this works in that a shared identity subtly underlies every image, despite all the courage to be different. For Melanie Thöni, this is a rural heritage that bears the insignia of patriarchy, which must first be broken open artistically before it can be experienced anew.

by  Florian Heimhilcher