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As part of our Editions series, we present a print from her iconic  'Pin-Up' series (1973-74). A self-portrait of the artist, seductively posing on an unmade bed in a rented Parisian hotel bed, this image was taken during a period of deep unrest and unhappiness for the artist. Erotic in nature, the 'Pin Up' series were taken almost on a whim, she explains: "I had some spare film, and I didn't know what to do with it." Considered to be her first ever 'artwork' (she worked as a fashion photographer prior to this), they are the first self-portraits of the artist's 40-year-long 'Jahreportraits' (Year Portraits) project, in which she photographed herself daily over the period of a year - repeating the process every five years since.

Presciently, Kubelka explains that the need of being both the photographer and the subject was born from isolation: "I stayed in my apartment, taking photographs, developing and enlarging them by myself. I didn't have a telephone. I was lonesome, obsessed with my work. So I would dance in front of the mirror because I needed intimacy in these hours. Unconsciously, I needed someone else in the flat with me. So I danced to free myself from being alone in the dark room, and I saw myself like a different person, like another young woman living with me who had none of the psychological instability, who was self-confident. She was an ideal in the mirror who didn't have the troubles I had." From her interview in the British Journal of Photography (2014). 

 

Kubelka's artistic research focuses on temporality, seriality and the body; Kubelka also creates radical films under the name of Friedl vom Gröller. Born in London in 1946 to Austrian parents seeking political refuge, Kubelka grew up in Berlin but returned to Vienna to study industrial photography at the Graphic Instruction and Research Institute in Vienna from 1965 to 1969. She ran her own photography studio from 1971 to 1977 and in 1990 founded her own "School of Artistic Photography" in Vienna. She lives and works in Vienna, Austria.