Linda WolfsgruberA Multi-talented Artist

"I love being able to invent something truly special for all my books."

We can recognize this ability in every single book Linda Wolfsgruber has written; each of her more than eighty books surprises with unexpected techniques, diverse figures, special spaces, and remarkable compositions of the visual and the literal. Her tenacity in researching and experimenting most likely originated in her childhood in between the Alps and the Dolomites in South Tirol, Italy. Born 1961 in Bruneck, Wolfsgruber grew up bilingual and communicated early with foreigners, as her parents hosted tourists in their house to make ends meet. Her cosmopolitanism may well have taken root there. Her talent was recognized early and she attended art college in St. Ulrich in Gröden (Italy), where three languages were taught and spoken. Realizing that languages are confined only to groups of people knowing the code might have sparked the conviction that images are a language without limits. Subsequently, she completed her training in typesetting in Munich, Germany, and graphic design in Bruneck, Italy, and with her study at the Scuola del Libro in Urbino, Italy. She started her work as a freelancing graphic designer, illustrator, and artist first in Bruneck and later on in Vienna, Austria, where she lives now.

Linda Wolfsgruber lets children participate in her creative process not only at schools but also at kindergarten and cultural institutions, thus stimulating their own creativity. The childlike perspective and their playful discovery of the world in turn provide the artist with new impulses. Since 1996, she has been teaching various techniques of illustration at the International Scuola d'illustrazione di Sarmede in Italy, where she supports and promotes many young illustrators.

"I get bored, when using the same over and over again."

Since her first publication in 1983, her artistic expression has been growing and developing for thirty-five years. It seems unbelievable that one single hand can work so diversely with colors, shapes, formats, moods, emotions, genres, narrative, and illustrative techniques. Over the course of her career, she has painted with acrylic colors, switched to tempera, later on became a master of etching and monotype, experimented with collage, and used photos of self-made figures before switching to drawing with pen and ink on handmade paper. She has continuously expanded her technical repertoire and has increasingly applied a mix of techniques, which have culminated in truly multi-layered images. Besides these techniques for illustrations, she works on big oil paintings, embroideries on handmade paper, and on frescos in public spaces; she is currently working on CD and book covers, as well as on animated films.

Combining diverse techniques allows the artist to break up familiar patterns of seeing. She uses mixed media as a technique to create surprising effects and to add value to the original text—from authors like H.C. Artmann, Kim Echlin, Inge Fasan, Christian Morgenstern, Heinz Janisch, Norbert C. Kaser, and Jorge Luján ao—which only reveals itself to the reader upon closer inspection. This plethora of tools also makes it possible for the pictures to stand on their own. Their major purpose is not to serve the story they depict; instead, they claim their own space—which turns into the readers' viewing space.

All these aspects can be discovered in Der Halskragen. Ein Skizzenbuch (The Collar. A Sketch Book, 2005). In this story of a vain collar, written by Hans Christian Andersen, the text-picture combination looks arbitrary. In one line at the bottom of the page, we read the story of the collar, who wants to marry someone but no one wants him. Finally, he invents his unsatisfied life as quite an extraordinary story. In a playful, postmodern associative manner, Der Halskragen offers a well-chosen selection of Wolfsgruber's work in the form of a sketchbook to both underline and counteract the text. A firework of artistic power unfolds before us from oil paintings, drawings, etchings, and collages, which she uses to stimulate a broad range of associations. The individual images sometimes reference real people and other works of literature, thus creating further layers...