Michael Höpfner

Born in Lower Austria, Michael Höpfner has been hiking through remote regions of the world for twenty years, including the plateaus of Tibet, the river courses of Albania, and the valleys of the Alps. He traverses these landscapes on foot during weeks-long marches, capturing them in photographs, drawings, and diary entries. Höpfner sees his hikes as a search for the human relationship with nature. In his works, he tells of silence, wordlessness, and loneliness, of existential experiences, both physical and mental, of simple magnitudes such as time and space, emptiness, and distance.

In his solo exhibition at the Landesgalerie Niederösterreich, Höpfner attempts to capture his journey through the last two decades in new works. “Walking, as I practice it, is always also an artistic act that rebels, protests, and seeks to inscribe new experiences... even against contemporary ideological and social views,” Höpfner emphasizes. “For me, walking is also a way of escaping existing patterns. As an artist, I didn't want to go into the studio, but rather out into the world in search of a lost relationship with nature. This alienation was and always has been a driving force for me.”