Q&A on the film WHAT’S HAPPENING? Art in the Life of Gertie Fröhlich with director, artist, and scriptwriter Marieli Fröhlich

In 2018, director Marieli Fröhlich began making a documentary about her mother, the artist Gertie Fröhlich.

The filmmaker interviewed Gertie Fröhlich and over 24 participants—Fröhlich’s friends and fellow artists as well as art historians and those who experienced Austria’s art scene firsthand—who discuss the themes and controversies surrounding Gertie Fröhlich’s status as an artist. The film also examines how Fröhlich shaped the Viennese post-war avant-garde while still a young artist.

Sun, 12.11.2023 4 pm — 5 pm

MAK – Museum of Applied Arts

Gertie Fröhlich, What’s the Matter?, 1986, Gouache

Black and white photograph: It shows a white woman dressed in a black cape, laughing and wearing a hat.

Exhibition room, in the middle a showcase, on the walls framed pictures, frontally a tapestry

As the resulting documentary unfolds, contradictions are increasingly brought to the fore. Would the influential post-war exhibition space Galerie (nächst) Sankt Stephan have existed without Gertie Fröhlich? Or was she simply a secretary, keeping things moving behind the scenes? Was her retelling of Greek myth the vision of a liberated matriarchal psyche or work that echoed other female artists’ deterritorialization and manifestations of the female body?

WHAT’S HAPPENING? Art in the Life of Gertie Fröhlich (2018–2023), a film by Marieli Fröhlich, will be shown as part of the exhibition GERTIE FRÖHLICH: (In)Visible Pioneer.

A museum ticket (admission ticket, MAK Annual Pass, Kulturpass, etc.) + participation fee of € 5 is required to attend the event.