Izložba Roberta Hammerstiela u Beču

Speech of academician Endre Pap,
President of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Vojvodina
at the opening of the exhibition Winterreise by Robert Hammerstiel,
in Leopold Museum in Vienna,
February 5, 2009

Sehr geherte Professor Leopold and Professor Hammerstiel!

Sehr geherte Damen und Heren!

Ich freue mich sehr das ich kann etwas sagen in die Name der Vojvodina Akademie fur Wissenschaft und Kunst on diese besondere Ausstellung der Zeichungen und Durchgrafiken Robert Hammerstiels. Wir haben mit Hammerstiel etwas zusammen. Wir sprechen nicht mit Verben. Ich bin Mathematiker und ich spreche mit formulas, und mit eine formula ich kann alle Theorie machen, und Robert Hammerstiel kann mit eine Grafiken eine ganze Leben erzahlen. Ich komme aus Vojvodina wo 26 Nationen leben, und ich kann auch Serbien und Hungar noch etwas sagen, aber entschuldigen das ich werde in Englisch sprechen.

The province of Vojvodina and the city of Vršac, where Prof. Hammerstiel is from, have a developed painting tradition in various painting directions during XVII, XIX and XX century.

His father, a baker, painted affectionately orthodox icons and sold them along bakery products in his shop at the outskirts of Vršac.

Being educated in the best European tradition of painting and graphics and achieving great success, Hammerstiel, as a man of interrupted childhood, never forgot his homeland. He paints his hometown, genre scenes of family life at the outskirts of Vršac, field landscapes, constantly calling to his homeland and childhood by painting. Hammerstiel’s painting, graphic first of all, are a sort of story-telling about childhood, joys and troubles, sunny days and nightmares. Painting worldwide, he more than once introduces into paintings of New York, Ternitz or a remote landscape, elements of Vršac, numerous churches of Vršac as he remembered them as a little boy, where he and his father studied icons and images of orthodox saints, whose trails we find in many of his work. But coming back to his homeland, he also starts painting other, new churches and buildings which enhance his tight relationship with the homeland, where he is trying to continue where he left off – to grow up, to somehow shape his Pannonian life by a more frequent stay.

We find his work an integral part of our and Vojvodinian contemporary art, and it certainly belongs to its highest reach.

We wish to express our gratitude to the Leopold Museum, first of all Prof. Rudolf Leopold, for enabling in this respectable museum yet another exhibition of Robert Hammerstiel’s work. He is your great artist and for a good reason an honorable member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Vojvodina. We are, as it shows at this exhibition, proud of him for a reason.

akademik Endre Pap, prof. Robert Hammerstiel, Günter Geyer (Wiener Städtische), prof. dr Rudolf Leopold, mr Peter Weinhäupl (Leopold Museum)