The Viennese artist Val Wecerka transforms letters, memory, and biographical ruptures into multi-layered visual objects. She is currently represented in the exhibition “Attersee rundum” at Galerie 422 in Gmunden.
What remains of language when it is no longer read, but seen? In Val Wecerka's works, writing becomes material. Letters are freed from their original function, becoming line, relief, structure, ornament, and sometimes almost landscape. What appears abstract at first glance carries traces of biography, origin, and memory.
Born in Burgas, Bulgaria, Wecerka has lived and worked in Vienna for many years. Her artistic education took her from the Art School in Sliven to the Fashion College Herbststraße and then to the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where she studied painting, graphics, and tapestry under Christian Ludwig Attersee, as well as free and experimental artistic design under Barbara Putz-Plecko. This combination of painting, textiles, objects, and space continues to shape her work to this day.
A central starting point is the question of home. What does home mean when it is not just a geographical place? How does memory change when it is mediated through language, paper, and distance? In her series “ (Un)written Letters” , Wecerka draws on an experience closely connected to her move to Vienna. In a time before effortless digital communication, letters were the most important connection to family. From this personal archive, an artistic language developed in which writing is not explained, but condensed.
Her works are often created in layers. Cardboard, paper, acrylic, modeling paste, wood, or textile elements form surfaces that fluctuate between drawing, relief, and object . Works such as “Freud’s Letter”, “Anne Frank”, “Hommage an Lassnig” or “Lines from the Past” show how writing intertwines historical and personal layers. It is not about readability in the classical sense. What matters is the moment in which language becomes physical.
In more recent groups of works, the focus shifts more strongly toward landscape and organic form. In “Poetry in Geometry”, rhythmic lines meet topographical structures. Works such as “Mountain Lines”, “Hommage an Monet” or “The Wave in Blue and Yellow” evoke contour lines, water movements, textile weaves, and geological layers. Geometry is never cool in Wecerka's work. It is permeable, moving, sometimes almost breathing.
The floral works in the series “We Don’t Hate Flowers” also expand this approach. Flowers are not conceived here as decorative elements, but as hybrid sign bodies. In the series “Viva”, Wecerka combines the politically charged gesture of the raised fist with everyday objects and floral forms. The result moves between pop, protest, and semantic shift: A familiar sign loses its ambiguity and opens up new spaces of meaning.
Val Wecerka is currently represented in the exhibition “Attersee rundum” at Galerie 422 in Gmunden. Christian Ludwig Attersee enters into a dialogue there with former students, spanning generations, materials, and artistic temperaments. For Wecerka, this context is natural: Attersee was not only her teacher at the Angewandte, but also stands for an art that repeatedly combines image, language, and the love of signs.