WHAT’S HAPPENING? Art in the life of Gertie Fröhlich(2023)
In 2018, director Marieli Fröhlich initiated a documentary about her mother, the artist Gertie Fröhlich. The seeds of the film began as a series of interviews with the 88-year-old artist, which were interrupted by her passing in 2020. What’s Happening? is the title of both the finished documentary and a painting dated 1986. The picture shows a running woman, her back turned towards the viewer, fleeing her bourgeois interior. She has knocked over a chair and abandoned an unfinished book beneath a painting of a bucking horse. The horse is too wild for the constraints of its frame, a picture within the painting‘s horizon, which also lines up with an unseen vanishing point beyond the window. Is this exterior landscape outside the window an infinite stage in which the vicissitudes of the protagonist’s daily life fall away, making way for lasting freedom in Fröhlich‘s Arcadia?
The director interviews over 20 artists, friends, and former collaborators whose recollections unveil the themes and the controversy surrounding Gertie Fröhlich‘s status as an artist, uncovering her influence on the Post-War Vienna Avant-Garde starting in her early 20s. As the film unfolds, these contradictions come to a head: Is the existence of the most important Austrian post-war gallery, Galerie nächst St. Stephan, indebted to Gertie Fröhlich, or was she merely the good spirit and secretary? Was her retelling of Greek myths an analogy for her vision of a refreshed matriarchal psyche — a position of equal significance to manifestations and deterritorialization of the body by Austria’s feminist artists?