MICHAEL HÖPFNER - Mountain without a Horizont

Opening: Thursday, May 28, 2026, at 7 p.m.

Welcome remarks: Iris Mailer-Schrey, Cultural Affairs Officer and City Councilor for the City of Schwaz

Sonja Fabian, Department of Culture and Public Relations, Austrian Alpine Club Museum in Innsbruck

On the exhibition: Karin Pernegger, Director and Curator of Kunstraum Schwaz ‍

"My artistic work always begins with a hike, which I see as a search. I try to free myself from rules and distractions through walking; by this I mean consumption, daily routines, social norms, etc.; I try to literally walk around them. Writing, drawing, and photography form a unity in my artistic work that I continually revisit and also a contradiction." ‍

Lower Austrian artist Michael Höpfner (1972) not only studied under Hamish Fulton but has also collaborated with him on several joint projects to this day, such as curating the group exhibition “The Walking Mountain” at the National Mountain Museum in Turin in 2024. Since the 2000s, regular long-distance hikes have taken him to the most remote regions of Eastern Europe, China, and Asia. He documents his hikes with black-and-white photographs taken with his Hasselblad camera, diary entries, and drawings. He documents the theme of intertwining and diverging mountain trails in the exhibition space using colorful woolen threads stretched across the room. During a long-distance hike, he had accompanied a nomadic tribe that taught him a special technique for spinning wool. To break the monotony of walking, they began to develop a craft that allowed them to spin wool while walking. From then on, Höpfner has incorporated this into his work, including his performative hikes.

"Exploring while walking and intuitive wandering stand in a complex relationship and tension with man-made places, territories, and political and military tensions. Since then, I have come to understand that walking in 21st-century art has nothing to do with the historical romanticism of the 19th century or the Land Art of the 20th century. In my walking gaze upon the world today, I am driven by an existential view of what it means to be human and our ideological entanglements of idealism, ecology, nationalism, technology, and esotericism. It is the inexplicable nature that draws me—and a search for the relationship of modern humans to this world and the reality in which we exist, but which is not solely ours.” (Quote from: From Here to Tibet – a conversation between two walking artists, Hamish Fulton, Michael Höpfner)‍

In addition to works by Michael Höpfner, we are exhibiting pieces from the collection of the Austrian Alpine Club Museum in Innsbruck, selected by the artist, which also explore the theme of walking in vast landscapes. For example, we are displaying Hermann Buhl’s final expedition diary, which ends with an entry dated June 20, 1957, or excerpts from letters written by geologist Helmut Heuberger during the 1954 Cho Oyu expedition, as well as a model of the Himalayas that depicts the routes the artist has traversed. The exhibition is significantly expanded by these historical loans.

Thanks to Gerald Zagler, Head of Culture and Public Relations, Austrian Alpine Club Museum Innsbruck and Sonja Fabian and Michael Guggenberger, Department of Culture and Public Relations, Austrian Alpine Club Museum Innsbruck.

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