Anne Marie Jehle
The Liechtenstein native Anne Marie Jehle, an artist who signed her works as A.M. Jehle and worked for 25 years in Feldkirch, Austria, was inspired by Fluxus and in some respects also by surrealism. She began working in the mid-1960s and used her family house, where she had grown up and lived, as a studio, storage space, photo lab, and exhibition venue. In 1989, in a sort of final act, she sealed this house shut and left her multifarious oeuvre behind (some of it as installations interwoven with the furniture and overall arrangements of the different rooms, some of it neatly packed
and stored in the attic) and moved to the United States. Jehle returned to Liechtenstein in 1993 but did no further work as an artist. In 2001, one year after she had passed away, the house in Feldkirch was opened and its contents discovered. Anne Marie Jehle created drawings, paintings, collages, photographs, objects, and installations. She worked with a wide range of media and materials such as everyday objects and handicrafts, and she also used text and language, poetry and puns in her critical way of dealing with the world in which she lived, attaching importance to the representation of the (female) self. The domestic life assigned to women in this Roman Catholic region of the Alps became one of the subjects of her work alongside the symbolic realm of patriarchal power structures in general, which she addressed with artistic wit and a melancholic undertone. Jehle maintained relations with the Fluxus-movement—and in 1969, she began to publish multiples with Vice Publishers, the first of which was called “Play Sand”. However, her art can be viewed as a kind of antithesis to the overall concept of Fluxus, whose central and characteristic elements of communication and international exchange appear reversed in her works—thus rendered paradox, disturbed, and often full of subversive irony. With her inventive, meaningful, and witty ideas, Jehle addressed notions of the local and the global, gender differences, and the conditions of art per se. W.S.
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