Walter Ego - Striving to Love ::: Buchpräsentation, Lesung & Ausstellung

Not regarded as an influential artist of our time, Walter Ego produced a body of not really innovative work mining popular culture, drawing and poetry, both modernist and alternative traditions. His work is marked by instability which is visible in alternating style and a constant flight of concrete form - which he set in relation to relentless self and social examinations, both dark and delirious. The show STRIVING TO LOVE will contain a potpury of drawings, poems, notes and personal objects as well as the presentation of the authors book and a performance. Born and growing up in a very small provincal village of Austria close to the danube. Walter Ego enjoyed being taught catholic and proletarian ideas mixed with rough farmers habits. He escaped to the city of Vienna when he was older. Later he started to study art at the department of PsychoConceptualArtPractices because he had no permission for other universities. He finished some years ago. Never won a price, nor got any stipendia or fellowship, neither did a residency. He has never been ouside of Europe nor could he refer to longer residencies in other countries. That he has no gallery must probably not be mentioned. He is doing therapy now. A fortuneteller is currently telling him that he thinks too much. Occasionally he appears in public but he prefers to disappear and wander in emptiness lost in time without time. Walter Ego is many: Petz Ha, Prof. Haselmayer, Papa, Pedrito, Peter Haselmayer, Petrus, …

This book is a praise of failure and refusal. It goes against the paradigm to think positive and to present adequate and speaks about doubt, insecurity and weakness. In between of constant refusal but still not being able to realize oneself, we can meet Walter Ego. While taking a look into the abyss of his emotional state, he shares his drawings and notes that have come up during this process of radical self inquiry. His story does not have a thread running through it connecting all its parts. His story has gaps and blank spaces to be filled again with new questions instead of answers. In that sense this book can be read as a palimpsest again and again, while retelling his permanent search for a way out without having a clear destination. This can go on forever until it all falls apart into fragments of the anti-hero who tries to withdraw and is never able to arrive. In the end it deals with his overall strive toward the ability to love and to wish. His struggle is carried by a melancholic undertone, at some times subtle at others humorous, always intertwining with poetic and philosophical moments, shaped by a tireless longing for a resistive way of life beyond its instrumentality.

Walter Ego; the name says it all: „I fuck me up to save me. This is not a program!“

First Edition, bahoe books Wien 24,5 x 18 cm | Broschur ca. 176 pages | € 13,- ISBN 9-345-344-564-384 Release October 2016.