For over forty years, the graphic artist and painter Theresia Schüllner has been working with autographs of poets and musicians. She creates book objects and paintings in various techniques, and her oeuvre also includes spatial installations such as scripture stelae.

Schüllner uses the autographs as artistic material. She silkscreens fragments of writing and text onto various materials, sometimes in greatly enlarged form, to then further process these prints. Through overpainting and additions, she initially creates a distance to the content of the texts: The writing loses its communicative function, it becomes a form. At the same time, however, Schüllner draws attention to a medium that has become foreign in times of electronic communication: handwriting. In it, the personality of the artists appears in a completely different way than in their texts and compositions. If one follows the sweeps, strokes, and curls of the handwriting, one can almost physically feel the tense energy or the searching hesitation with which the artists put their works on paper. In this way, a personal, almost intimate encounter across time succeeds, which in the end leads back to the texts and perhaps to a deeper understanding.  

Schüllner cites two important starting points for her work: her encounter with Karl Otto Götz, who was her teacher at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the early 1960s and impressed her with his generously gestural painting, and her preoccupation with English "metaphysical poetry," in which basic questions of human existence are reflected in metaphorical speech - turned philosophically or religiously. Works with a comparable depth of thought continue to inspire Schüllner to this day.

An event in the series "Remembering the Past - Shaping the Future".
In cooperation with DMKmentis and the Philosophy Department of the WWU.