liebling.! etching art from four decades

The technique of etching has a long tradition in Gugging. Initial etchings were created with the support artist Peter Pongratz back in the Seventies. Leo Navratil gave his patients copper plates to work on using a simple burin. At that time, the Gugging Artists were still unknown and nobody believed that their works would find the international recognition of art critics.  To this day, printed graphics have remained a medium of the Gugging Artists, printed in the form of simple, uncorrected etchings. The simplicity of the etching technique in Gugging often exposes artistic aspects that remain hidden or obscured on colored pencil drawings or canvases. Moreover, the delicacy of the stroke cannot be matched by any other artistic technique. While, due to its firm rooting in art history and its reproducibility, the technique of etching is rarely associated with Art Brut, this medium often demands of artists pictorial solutions that are less “contrived” than do many prime examples so-called raw art. As part of the exhibition liebling.! in 2007,196 works were on show, including rare items of Gugging etching art by Oswald Tschirtner, Johann Hauser and August Walla, but unknown works were also presented to the public for the first time. Following the presentation blug – four decades of art from gugging this extensive exhibition of etchings was an opportunity—unusual for Art Brut—to get to know another level of art from Gugging.