The South Bank at Dusk
On the way home I got to thinking about exhibitions. It's a while since I showed any work; when you're the Unknown Artist you have to make your own luck, and the effort and expense of even a modest show is usually disproportionate to to the rewards, either in exposure or cash sales. A website and some self-published books seem rather less writ in water, and remain permanently on view. Putting work on a wall can seem even more of a vanity project than, say, writing a blog. I more or less decided that I wouldn't really mind if I didn't have another exhibition.
So, when I got home, it was with a sense of astonishment that I found, among my new emails, an unsolicited and quite flattering invitation to exhibit work at the Fotoforum Gallery in Innsbruck, Austria. As far as I can see, this is not a wicked leg-pull by one of the above-mentioned friends. Nor does it seem to be the art world equivalent of an email from a Nigerian prince. I need to ask some serious questions about this offer, but all of a sudden exhibitions seem quite exciting again.
Now, I have always been a Marxist of the Groucho tendency: I've never really thought it would be worth joining a club that would have the likes of me as a member. But Innsbruck and I have form, as they say.
We spent our first family holiday abroad in the Tirol, and I started to study German at school that same year. Innsbruck was the first really exotic city I had seen. Then a friend and I hitchhiked through Europe in the summer after finishing secondary school, surfing the tidal wave of mobile youth swilling around everywhere in those days (remember looking for the local sleep-in?), only to wash up in Innsbruck. I recall a sunny afternoon in the hills above the town, high as a kite on red wine, when a mole burrowed up from underground right beside my ear. Impossible to describe the fullness of feeling you can experience when you are just 18 and free as a bird.
Anyway. The simple reality is that someone in Austria likes my work, and I might be having an exhibition in Innsbruck, and they might even fly me out there for the opening. How cool is that?
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