Preface

With the exhibition of Hortensia in the Cairo Opera Art Gallery an Austrian artist is presented for the first time, who feels obligated to the country and its art by special empathy intuition, projecting abilities and love.

Her designs with their economical colours, but clear outlines give a very formful impression of architecture and the landscape of this country along the Nile. Since the beginning of the European  traveling to Egypt, the engagement with the important witnesses of the Egyptian past, be it the pyramids or the mosque of lbn Tulun, was again and again the subject of artistic translation. Still many decades before the invention of the photography, which by the way passed straight in Egypt its first probation as medium of landscape and architecture documentation, innumerable designs, engravings and prints formed the picture of Egypt in European consciousness.  The large boards of the " Description de l'Egypte " are to be called here as a particularly important, documentary and also artistic work.

Hortensia places herself here into the tradition of the rendition of architecture, which she tries certainly to solve with her own artistic understanding and technical inventories. These are designs, which do not illustrate but reflect distinctly, and thus refer to the today's appearance of Egyptian culture landscapes.

Dr. Wilfried Seipel

General Director, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria. April, 2000
Preface to the Catalogue of Hortensia for the exhibition in Cairo / Egypt, 2000

==> Ägyptische Zeichnungen / Egypt Drawings