about Un Paradiso Amaro/Bitter Paradise

Elke Krasny

She is not talked about. No texts are written about her. Her life was part of art. She is not part of the history of art. A search for her leads to exhibition catalogs of the Vienna Secession, the Biennale di Venezia, the Vienna Künstlerhaus, and the Glaspalast in Munich. Her name was to be found everywhere. She had made a name for herself. She was recognized. A person vanishes when no one remembers. Oblivion is extinction. 

The name of the artist this exhibition reminds us of is Teresa Feodorowna Ries.

Ries has shared something about her life with us. She penned an autobiography at a young age: Die Sprache des Steines (The Language of Stone). It can be found in the library of Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts. Based on this book, artist and curator Valerie Habsburg started her research on Teresa Feodorowna Ries in 2019. Her artistic and scholarly explorations are a tribute to Ries’ life, activities, and works.

Born in Budapest on January 30, 1866, the Jewish sculptress Teresa Feodorowna Ries became professor Edmund Hellmer’s private student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 1895. At that

time, it was not possible for a woman to be admitted to the Academy as a regular student. Women were not admitted before 1920. Ries was already very successful during her years of study with Edmund Hellmer and quickly became internationally known. She exhibited at Vienna’s Künstlerhaus as early as 1896. This was followed by shows at the Vienna Secession and her participation in the world exhibitions in Paris in 1900 and Turin in 1911.

Teresa Feodorowna Ries wrote her autobiography as early as 1928—before the Second World War and long before she could know that many of her works were to be expropriated and destroyed by the National Socialists. The personnel archive of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna holds a document that shows that she was the first woman to apply for a professorship at the Academy in 1931. Her application remained unanswered. Teresa Feodorowna Ries survived both World Wars and never returned to Vienna after her late escape in 1942. Most of her works are considered to have disappeared.

How can the work of an artist that is considered to have disappeared be curated today? How do life testimonies that provide evidence of her existence—her autobiography, her job application,

and her handwritten will—relate to the few surviving works such as the monumental sculpture Witch Doing Her Toilet for Walpurgis Night? What do the traces of bomb fragments on her sculpture Eva convey?

Exhibiting the investigations into a person’s life and work when the person’s life and work are in danger of being erased by oblivion, fills with concern, is an act of memory work, motivated by solidarity in the search for justice. Curating derives from the Latin word curare, to care, to take care of something. In German, the word Sorge is ambiguous, meaning concern/worry and care. This exhibition presents worries resulting from taking care—memory work as an ethical and political challenge, solidarity as a motivation for curating.

What does it mean when a life’s work is threatened by the fact that the person is a woman, a Jew, an artist, a mother? Solidarity establishes cohesion. Solidarity ensures that. Solidarity is based on concern and care.