Elke Krystufek (b. Austria, 1970) is an Austrian self portraitist working in a variety of media including: painting, sculpture, video and performance art.
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Krystufek studied at the Fine Arts Academy of Vienna in the early 1990s. Her work is informed, by a history of Austrian artists - from Egon Schiele to the Vienna Actionists - who have explicitly explored sexuality in art.
Elke Krystufek is a visual artist and writer. Since her first big solo presentation at the Secession in Vienna in 1997, she is working on the subject of the “Archive”. Her collection of images in the form of postcardsize photographs, titled “ I am your mirror” took inspiration of the documentary work of photographer Nan Goldin and the “Atlas” by the German Painter Gerhard Richter. With the exhibition “Liquid Logic” at the then direction of Peter Noever, who gave her access into all storages of the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, the MAK, she drew comparisons between a thematically arranged Selection of partly never shown pieces from the depots of the museum and the biography of the Dutch-American artist Bas Jan Ader. Selections of a film, that she shot in connection with the exhibition on Easterisland can be viewed on Youtube in parts as the background of a talk she gave in 2009 at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. 2009 she represented Austria at the Austrian Pavillon at the 53rd Biennale of Venice together with Dorit Margreiter and Franziska and Lois Weinberger. In this show she dealt with the rare arthistorical phenomenon of a nude male model painted by a heterosexual woman and the last film by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau “Tabu”. Since her solo exhibition at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, the gallery gives access to part of the Elke Krystufek Archive on the subject of immigration. On April 13th 2011, her first theaterplay “Hub” premiered at the Garage X, Theater at Petersplatz in Vienna. On May 27th her first public outdoor sculpture titled “The Wall of Silence” in the Schlosspark Grafenegg was destroyed on desire of Tassilo Metternich-Sándor. A documentation of the destruction and a fragment of the sculptur have been archived as a donation by the artist at the Niederösterreichisches Landesmuseum. For November 2012 a large overview of a body of work in relation to landscape painting is planned at the Haus am Waldsee in Berlin.