Fredy Koschitz and Her Family Ties / exhibition opening
Fredy Koschitz and Her Family Ties / exhibition opening
UGM Kabinet, Strossmayerjeva 6
Saturday, 14 January 2023, 11:00
curator: Andreja Borin, museum consultant
You are invited to the UGM Kabinet for the opening of the exhibition of the painter Fredy Koschitz (1914–2001), who lived and worked in Maribor between 1941 and 1945. We are glad that her name has not faded from memory and that we can restore another artist's rightful place in the fine arts. The paintings of Fredy Koschitz are once more being presented to the public exactly seventy years after the painter's solo exhibition in Maribor, in 1943.
"The path to discovering Fredy Koschitz was rather unusual. Maribor Art Gallery holds two of her paintings, but virtually nothing was known about the artist. During the preparations of the exhibition Ladies first! Women Artists from Styria 1850–1950 at the Neue Galerie Graz, the curator of that exhibition, Dr Gudrun Danzer, was researching female artists in Styria, and the name Fredy Koschitz was listed as well. This sparked my interest, as until then we had mistakenly thought that Fredy was a man! The knot began to unravel when I also came across the name of Elza Obereigner in an archive document on registered family members at a Ljubljana address. She was the artist's aunt and the first trained Slovenian sculptor. Her works were first presented to the public as late as 2018–2019 at the City Museum of Ljubljana under curator Barbara Savenc." (Andreja Borin, museum consultant)
We grew to know the life story of Fredy Koschitz (born Malec, 1914–2001) and also the family ties that connect her with her aunt Elsa Kastl Obereigner (1884–1973), sculptor, painter, and miniaturist, and with her cousin Elizabeta Charlotte Obereigner, married name Hribar, also a sculptor, who later created under the name Liza Hribar (1913–1996). Koschitz's first daughter, Karin Woschitz (b. 1941), also works as a sculptor.
