Hannes Gröblacher
Illustration
Live sketches made for Cinema Photographique Contemporary
at Kunsthalle Wien project space
commissioned by AUSTRIANFASHION.NET
Ubahnpeople
Where does the privacy of an individual in a public space begin? Where does it end? And how is the border between my private being and public life defined? Austrian illustrator and creative artist Hannes Gröblacher travels the U-Bahn in Vienna with an ink pen and a sketchbook, tracing the fleeting figures and faces which he meets on his way through the city.
The public space of the city occupies an important role in Gröblacher’s work and has long been a source of inspiration and intrigue for the artist on a personal as well as artistic level. A few years ago Gröblacher began to post his drawings on Flickr, under the title ‘Ubahnpeople’. Today, after three years of sketching people on the underground, his collection contains nearly four thousand portraits. As a result of this project, Gröblacher has recently set up a collaborative project together with Eva Ehrlich and the concept store in Vienna Gabarage. Using recycled materials to create bags, Gröblacher’s portraits can be bought online as cover prints for the bag, and once again are brought back into the domain of public urban space.
Gröblacher’s educational background lies in landscape design and landscape architecture. Having spent some time in Berlin and Brisbane Australia, he has settled down in Vienna, but exists through his work in a constant dialogue with the rest of the urban world. This exhibition presents Gröblacher’s drawings from the making of Cinema Photographique in 2012.
‘The sketches I made during the creation of Cinema Photographique were my first contact with the fashion world. It allowed me to get a glimpse of the hard work behind the glamorous fashion scene. As the shooting took place in various open spaces within the Viennese city centre, my work allowed me to be at once a spectator and a documenter of the interaction between the photographer and the models and at the same time of the various shooting scenes and their passers-by. The challenge of this specific work was to catch the characteristic moment from the continuous flow between backstage preparations and spotlight action.’