Helga Michie. I Am Beginning to Want What I Am

"Where does the consolation from these pictures come from? It is a mystery, but it’s there." —Ilse Aichinger on the works of her twin sister.

Helga Michie, born in Vienna in 1921 as the twin sister of Ilse Aichinger, fled with a Kindertransport to London in July 1939, where she lived until her death in late 2018. Helga established close contact with renowned Austrian artists and writers in British exile, such as Elias and Veza Canetti, Erich Fried, Robert Neumann, H. G. Adler, and Michael Hamburger. She first tried to get a foothold as an actress (The Third Man, Odette), later as an author and translator. It was not until the mid-1960s that she started working as a visual artist. Past horrors of persecution and displacement return almost like dreams in her quasi-automatic drawings: relocated into the uncanny world of fairy tales and mediated by poetic humor, keen observations of everyday activities, and experiments with various printing techniques. Simultaneously, the artist probes the possibilities of freely combining geometric shapes and colorful abstractions. Helga Michie creates a multifaceted, expressive graphic work, which this monograph documents extensively for the first time.