Exposure to art opens up new aspects, values and emotions; this mental openness is also reflected in the transparency of the company’s architecture. The works are shown at the offices and headquarters with an emphasis on Spittal/Drau and the Strabag Haus, Vienna. The collection is constantly growing with works of artists from all generations. The identification of the employees with “their” pictures contributes to an atmosphere of inspiration and increased attention to their own surroundings. Many employees discovered their enthusiasm for art and began to assemble their own small collections. The Kunstforum team supports them in this with advice.
> Collection artists
In this collection, winners of the Strabag Artaward are united with pioneers and outsiders, classical modern painters, painters of the Austrian Informel, renowned painters of the 90s and 80s as well as recent talents.
There are only a few but very extraordinary sculptures in the collection: On the plaza of Strabag Haus Vienna can be seen three large bronze and aluminum casts by the Austrian sculptor Bruno Gironcoli. Inside the building, in separate areas near the elevators, sculptures of Alfred Hrdlicka can be found. At the Strabag headquarters in Bratislava, the installation “House Attack” by Erwin Wurm is located on top of the roof. This work of art looks like a single family house smashed into the headquarters.
Qualitative characteristics and not chronological completeness constitute the structure of the collection. Commitment, idealism, artistic serendipity, high standards of quality and personal contact with the artists are the conditions that define the Artcollection, which reflects the large artistic potential of Austria and its neighbor states.
A changing selection of works from the Artcollection are displayed on this page. Pictures and Information on the winners of the Strabag Artaward can be found under Archive and Program.
HERMANN NITSCH
Hermann Nitsch, born in 1938 in Vienna, is considered the most important initiator of the excessive “Wiener Aktionismus”. First, however, Nitsch was occupied as a painter in the late 50s and early 60s with Tachism and Abstract Expressionism. He studied at the Graphic University in Vienna and, starting in 1960, organized his first “theatrical action-painting". Until 1995, Nitsch was professor at the Academy and the University for Applied Arts in Frankfurt. Nitsch is called an "actionist" or a performance artist. He is associated with the Vienna Actionists and conceived his art outside traditional categories of genre. Nitschs abstract splatter paintings as his performance pieces established a theme of controlled violence, using bright reds, maroons and pale greys that communicate organic mutilation. In the 1950s, Nitsch conceived of the Orgien Mysterien Theater (which roughly translates as "Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries"), staging over 100 performances since 1962. From the 80s, Nitsch organized the “Orgy-Mystery Theatre” in his castle in Prinzendorf. He also concentrated on autonomous painting, his music compositions and opera pictures. The Hermann Nitsch Museum in Mistelbach was opened in 2008.
KARL KORAB
Karl Korab was born in 1937 in Falkenstein, Lower Austria. In 1957, the artist began
studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (class of Sergius Pauser). In 1961, Korab began studying to be an art instructor (only for two years). He earned his diploma in 1964 and received the Art Prize of Lower Austria. In 1969, he worked for the first time with the material polyester. He worked predominantly on prints and serigraphs. Since 1971, Korab lives and works in Sonndorf (Waldviertel). He received the Cultural Prize of Lower Austria
in 1972.
> Galerie Hilger
ARNULF RAINER
The Austrian artist Arnulf Rainer was born in 1929 in Baden near Vienna and lives and works in Upper Austria. Arnulf Rainer is internationally renowned for his abstract informal art. In his early years, Rainer was influenced by Surrealism. In 1950, he founded the Hundsgruppe (dog group) together with Ernst Fuchs, Arik Brauer and Josef Mikl. After 1954, Rainer’s style evolved toward the destruction of forms with the blackening, painting-over and masking of illustrations and photographs dominating his later work. He was close to the Vienna Actionism movement, featuring body art and painting under the influence of drugs. He did a lot of work on Hiroshima after the bombing. In 1978, he received the Great Austrian National Prize. In the same year, and in 1980, he became the Austrian representative at the Venice Biennale. From 1981 to 1995, Rainer held a professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna - the same place where he aborted his own studies after three days, unsatisfied. His works are shown in the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. As the culmination of the appraisal of his work, the Arnulf Rainer Museum opened in New York, United States in 1993, and the Arnulf-Rainer Museum in Baden near Vienna was opened in 2009.
oil/canvas, 135 x 140 cm, 2009
WOLFGANG HOLLEGHA
Wolfgang Hollegha is considered the leading abstract painter in Austria. From 1947 to 1954, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna with Josef Dobrovsky and Herbert Boeckl. In 1956, together with Josef Mikl, Markus Prachensky and Arnulf Rainer, he formed the "Malergruppe St. Stephan". In 1960, he was invited by Clement Greenberg to participate in a group exhibition of abstract painters in New York. In 1964, he participated in the third Documenta in Kassel. Since 1962, he lives and works in Rechberg, Styria, where he has built for himself a 14-meter-high studio tower. He became a professor at the Vienna Art Academy in 1972 and remained in this position until his retirement in 1997.
> Galerie Ulysses
STEFAN WYKYDAL
Stefan Wykydal was the winner of the Strabag Artaward in 2005. He was born in Vienna in 1976. In his paintings and his paper works, he emblemizes global mass culture, creating pictorial interpretations of themes from everyday life, surrounding fields and environments, such as town buildings, sculptures in the context of social housing of the 1950s, painted school fronts, kindergartens, sculptures in front of schools and public areas, bus stops, scenes from football matches, arrangements of everyday items. His still lives also contain aliens, animals and plants. Plastic shapes, freely and freshly interpreted, with the eye of an artist working on advancing new interpretations of artistic trends. Wykydal taps the inexhaustible well of mass media and makes use of specially manipulated photographs. He creates a new, figurative reality that fluctuates between figurative description and abstract reflexivity. Wykydal´s work strikes a fine balance between free focus and a strict orientation at the selected subject, a camera lens to be held by the observer.
> Galerie Schmidt
CLEMENS WOLF
Clemens Wolf, born in Vienna in 1981, has his artistic roots in street art. Even though he now works on canvas, the reference to urban space is a central part of his work. Years ago, he began to search for dilapidated buildings and make them the object of his paintings. The aura of disintegration, the ambiguity of destruction and the threat that emanates from these places fascinates him to such an extent that he tries to capture this aesthetic of the moment of decay in his work. In the large-format paintings in his series entitled “The Great Mess”, the young Viennese painter counterpoints the eroding monuments using a textured combination of oil and stencil techniques to depict the architecture that has been left to decay in the midst of urban spaces. This is his manner of dealing critically with the postindustrial and social trends without becoming too blatant. The present trends in the global economy make Wolf’s monochrome disintegration aesthetics particularly relevant; after all, some of his motifs symbolize the downfall of industrial operations in times of economic decline of the past century. Other motifs, such as the burned out ruins of the Sofiensäle in Vienna, testify to the unstoppable end of a historic place and thus the history of an era. Geronimo-Noah Hirschal, editor and journalist
NIKOLAUS MOSER
Nikolaus Mosers abstract work reminds one of colorful landscapes. The plastic and colorful effects of his pictures are very impressive. The artist was born in 1956 in Spittal/Drau, Carinthia. At the Academy of Fine Arts, he studied in the classes of various modern classical painters: Carl Unger and Adolf Frohner. His pictures are pastose paintings made with brushes and putty. The topic of the art works is nature: forests, meadows, the sun and the sea. His art works represent an important emphasis of art from Carinthia within the Strabag Artcollection.
where it was; acrylic / wood, 65 x 51 cm, 2003
BERTRAM HASENAUER
In his portraits, Bertram Hasenauer (born in 1970 in Saalfelden, Salzburg, lives and works in Berlin) offers finely differentiated views of the nature of the represented young people and penetrates to the essence of their respective types. This concerns representations of concentrated reality.
Fluctuating between introspection and observation, the borders of his pictures occur from the inside and outside. Imagination and perception overlay each other. The basic material for his paintings consists of pictures from magazines and newspapers. He works on them since the essence of the particular type is pronounced. They have in common youth and an androgynous appearance.
DARYOUSH ASGAR / ELISABETH GABRIEL
Daryoush Asgar, born in 1975 in Teheran, studied from 1996 to 2000 at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna. In 2002, he was the winner of the Strabag Artward. His large-sized works show the spirit of our time – reflecting life, spirit and the desire for transformation of young people by using different costumes and trendy attributes. The artist now lives in Vienna and has collaborated since 2005 with Elisabeth Gabriel.
FRITZ WOTRUBA
Fritz Wotruba (1907 Vienna - 1975 Vienna) was an Austrian sculptor of Czech-Hungarian descent. He was considered one of the most notable Austrian 20th century sculptors. In his work, he increasingly dissolves figurative components in favor of geometrical abstraction with the shape of the cube as the basic form. Fritz Wotruba was born in 1907 as the youngest of eight children in Vienna. From 1921 to 1925, he was trained as an engraver as an apprentice in the engraving and cutting workshop of Josef Schantin in Vienna. From February to summer 1926, he attended the arts and trades school of the Austrian Museum of Art and Industry and open evening courses on nude drawing. In fall 1926, he enrolled in studies in sculpting at the arts and trades school. Through the end of his studies, he was a student of Anton Hanak, and he received a stipend from the Vienna Society of Modern Art, the Austrian Chamber of Labor and the city of Vienna. Probably his greatest work, on which he worked until his death, was the planning of the “Church of the Holy Trinity” in Mauer, Vienna, better known as Wotruba Church. He did not live to see the completion of the church in 1976. Many of his statues can be seen in public parks in Vienna. The Lying Adolescent is located in an exhibition in the Albertina, Vienna.
MARKUS PROSCHEK
Markus Proschek (born 1981 in Salzburg, lives and works in Vienna) was the winner of the Strabag Artaward 2008. At first sight, the work of Markus Proschek appears precise and clear, nevertheless the paintings withdraw from hasty evaluation. This is true of both historical (picture) material used in the work and of the work itself. The moment one believes to have understood the artistic intention, it vanishes immediately by showing a new aspect: Is it documentation, accusation, a play on the expectations of viewers or historical voyeurism?
JAN VASILKO
Jan Vasilko is the winner of the Strabag Artaward International 2009. Vasilko’s painting has for a long time inclined towards a unique creative program emerging from the romantic enthusiasm for production and industrial machines, various mechanisms, production halls and robots. “Mechanisms” in Vasilko’s paintings fulfill the function of the protagonists, bearers of the ideological or philosophical messages and symbols. The important moment is the absurdity in the “Frankenstein-exchange” of the roles of a human being and his creation – an inanimate mechanical object. Within this transformation process, the artist constantly toys with a classic iconography whilst making use of its formal content and dogma. His personal version of the painting corresponds to this with its motif based in techno-cleanliness. Extremely neat handwriting dominates here, geometrically accurate lines, clean areas creating bright compositions and softened coloring. In his latest works, he moves towards more graphic expression, the painting becomes almost monochromatic and based mostly on linear relationships. Peter Králik, artist
> Siemens Artlab
ZORAN MUSIC
Music was born in 1909 in Slovenia, near the city of Gorizia, Italy. The family first settled in the Yugoslav region of Lower Styria, he attended high school in Maribor. Between 1930 and 1935, he continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. Music has lived and worked in both Venice and Paris where Lyric Abstraction and the French Informel defined his artistic life. After a detention at Dachau, the origin for his restart as painter was a preoccupation with the Dalmatian landscape of his childhood. Music was strongly influenced by Byzantine mosaics and icons, organic motifs became more abstract in the sixties. Music kept his studio in Venice and exhibited at the Venice Biennial 1960, when he was awarded the Unesco-Prize. The much acclaimed series We are not the Last, in which the artist transformed the terror of his experiences in the concentration camp into documents of universal tragedy, was made in the 1970s. In 1981, Music was appointed Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in Paris. Music’s work has been honored in numerous international exhibitions, such as the large retrospective exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1995. Music died in Venice in 2005 at the age of 96.
chalk/ paper, 42 x 30 cm, 1982
GÜNTER BRUS
Günter Brus (born in 1938 in Ardning, Styria) is an Austrian painter, performance artist, graphic artist and writer. In 1964, together with Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, he was the co-founder of Wiener Aktionismus (Viennese Actionism). Breaking conventions and taboos his aggressively presented actionism was regarded intentionally. In 1968, he was sentenced to 6 months in prison after the event “Art and Revolution” at the University of Vienna. He fled to Berlin with his family and returned to Austria in 1976. In his “Bild-Dichtungen”, he achieves a synthesis between poetry and painting. Brus was awarded the Grand Austrian State Prize in 1997. Most of his works contain aspects that are seen as controversial and out of one’s comfort zone, but this just seems to add to the somewhat endearing nature of his art.
> Galerie Heike Curtze
mixed media on canvas, 170 x 130 cm, 1990
Manfred (born in 1957 in Altheim, lives and works since 1995 in Peuerbach, Upper Austria) is considered one of the most important contemporary Upper-Austrian painters, who strongly influenced the art scene of the 90s. Today, he mostly paints on canvas and glass. He developed an unmistakable pictorial language with gestic forms and turbulent movements as a reaction between the atmosphere of a place and the surrounding objects. The inspiration comes from material causes, from the line of a landscape, from the type of its vegetation, light and temperature, from the relationship of humans to each other and from the feeling of ones own body.
ROBERT SCHABERL
In 1961, Robert Schaberl was born in Feldbach. He studied at the University Mozarteum in Salzburg and lives and works in Vienna. The strict reduction in his work opens new entrances to the visual argument with painting and refers to visual values. The language (the material) in these pictures must be understood as a strictly consolidated one, oriented completely toward the actual substance. The tonality and saturation of color with its modulations is brought to life by the effect of light. The central forms strengthen the authenticity of the painting; the dialogue concerning value that is embodied in this work permits an interrelation with other discourses, such as photography
30 x 41cm, 1998
SIEGFRIED ANZINGER
The artist was born in 1953 in Weyer, Upper Austria and studied from 1971 to 1977 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. In 1982, Anzinger moved to Cologne. The first important exhibitions in which he participated were the "documenta VII" in Kassel and "Zeitgeist" in Berlin in 1982. Anzinger is considered one the most important painters of Austrian expressive and abstract-figurative painting since the beginning of the 80´s. Mythological themes, figures and animals are represented. Anzinger, who lives today in Vienna and Cologne, numbers among the most internationally recognized Austrian artists of the middle-aged generation.
mixed media / paper, 80 x 60 cm, 2003
VALENTIN OMAN
The work of Valentin Oman (born in 1935 in Carinthia, studied at the University for Applied Arts in Vienna) revolves around the idea of man. The represented figures emerge in fragmentary forms as torsos and heads from the image spaces or stand alone in silhouettes against the neutral background. The artist works in all medias: graphics, writing, painting and sculpture. Collages of fragments and indications recall the transitory nature of humans, they pick up the central theme of human existence in tension between the past and the future.
SIGGI HOFER
Siggi Hofer was the winner of the Strabag Artaward in 2006. The native South Tyrolean (born in 1970), a very willful artist, brings his conception of the architectural occupation of land to paper. Multistoried building complexes, housing developments and industrial buildings rise on suspended free areas. Motorways, bridges and rivers do not always have the function of a junction or connection; they break off, flow into the depths of gaping ravines. From a birds-eye view and with obsessive precise details, Siggi Hofer proposes scurrile utopian concepts of the conquest of space. Intervening texts act as compositional breaks and reveal the narrative potential of the work.
SEVDA CHKOUTOVA
In the exhibition naked from Sevda Chkoutova (born 1978 in Sofia, Bulgaria; study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna) in the Strabag Artlounge 2006 were shown drawings with large range childish emotion - from joyful excitation to anger and fear. Not at least the disturbing and at the same time attractive effect of the works are the result of the intensive reflecting conflict with the medium drawing.
ERNST GRADISCHNIG
The loose and sensitively painted impressions by the Carinthian artist (born 1949) exhibit varying tendencies, seasons, experience and situations. An assimilation of immediacy and spontaneity and the transcription of experience as well as a strongly abstract stylistic idiom determine the impression of the pictures.
In the interaction of the colors and the representation of light situations, the feeling for atmosphere and nuance becomes very clear. The characteristics of a landscape as well as the character of a moment
are retained through concentration on the substantial manifestations of color, light and nature elements.
acrylic /canvas, 130 x 106 cm, 1991
MARKUS PRACHENSKY
Markus Prachensky was born in Innsbruck in 1932 as the son of the architect and painter Wilhelm Nicolaus Prachensky. He moved to Vienna in 1952 and studied architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts under L. Welzenbacher. From 1953 onward, he studied painting, especially under Albert Paris Gütersloh. Prachensky belonged to the circle of artists attached to the Galerie St. Stephan, which was run by Monsignore Otto Mauer, and participated in their exhibitions and activities. He was a founding member of the “Gruppe St. Stephan” together with Wolfgang Hollegha, Josef Mikl and Arnulf Rainer. After initial attempts in the figural tradition, Prachensky turned to abstract painting in the ’fifties’ and remains today a leading practitioner of informal Tachism. Prachensky lived in Paris and Vienna from 1957 onward and moved to Berlin in 1963 and to Los Angeles in 1967. He returned to Europe in 1970 and was director of a master class for painting at the Academy of Fine Arts from 1983 to 2000.
FRANZ GRABMAYR
Franz Grabmayr lives in Vienna and in the ‘Waldviertel’, a region of lower Austria. He studied from 1954 to 1964 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. His art is influenced by a strong solidarity with nature. Grabmayr’s abstract landscapes and Tanzbilder (studies of movement) are characterized by their expressive ductus with bright and pastose colorism.
Buntstift auf Papier, 95 x 65 cm, 2008
MICHELA GHISETTI
Michela Ghisetti was born in 1966 in Bergamo, Italy. She works as a stage designer and artist in Vienna. Feminine yet openly and at the same time mysteriously, spontaneously and meditatively autobiographical and archetypal, the artist does not compile a humorous and sensitive dialogue with the world in her designs, collages and paintings. Like autobiographic notes, the paintings and collages appear in their formal pictorial, almost graphical psychological dimensions.
MAX WEILER
Max Weiler was born in Hall, Tyrol in 1910. He studied painting from 1930 to 1937 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna under Karl Sterrer and was himself appointed director of the master class for painting in 1964. Alongside his canvasses, he created a significant series of both ecclesiastical and secular murals, together with mosaics, glass paintings and ceramic murals. Weiler’s pictorial language, which initially was still naturalistic, quickly developed into a characteristic version of lyrical abstraction. Numerous public commissions, international exhibitions and awards reflect his pre-eminence as an artist. Max Weiler is considered one the founders of abstract landscape painting in Austria. In Weiler´s late work, he also exhibits the historical process of the “green consciousness”. His oeuvre contains new and exemplary forms of nature representation, beyond the usual pattern of the landscape.
acrylic / canvas, 130 x 90 cm, 2006
HERMANN JOSEF PAINITZ
In his work, which he defines as “methodical art”, Hermann J. Painitz (born in 1938 in Vienna) compiles a bases for optical encoding and decoding and attempts to graphically convert sizes and orders of magnitude. Substitutes are established for things and concepts. They are parameters for the translation; they serve for recombination and organization, agreements, grammar and general rules that are the keys to understanding and decoding. In his sculptures, Painitz manufactures simple, interleaving right parallelepipeds with rounded edges. The main focus of his paintingis on circles, which are placed into relation with graphic indications and geometrical forms.
mixed media/canvas, 140 x 110 cm, 2001
PETER SENGL
Peter Sengl lives in Vienna and studied under Sergius Pauser at the Academy of Fine Arts. The focus of his pictures is pressed and tormented humans strained within machines. He refers to persons and motifs of the history of art. Sengl’s worlds depict everyday life and consist of a clearly described and closely defined arsenal: animals, flowers, arts and crafts, artifacts and memorabilia. The participants in these scenarios of force have something in common: beauty.
lithograph, 70 x 50 cm, 1969
HANS STAUDACHER
The abstract paintings of Hans Staudacher, main representative of the Austrian Lyric Informel and Lettrismus, are implemented in a gestic, graphic performance. He combines characters, symbols and notes in addition to cardboard and papers in his collages. Staudacher was born near the “Ossiacher See” in Carinthia in 1923 and grew up in Villach. He worked independently and later became a member of the Viennese Secession, Forum Stadtpark Graz and the Carinthian Art Association. From 1954-62, he stayed in Paris many times. Since 1950, he has lived and worked in Vienna. Today, Hans Staudacher is one of the most important and well-known artists of his generation in Austria, alongside Markus Prachensky and Hermann Nitsch. The Strabag Artcollection contains an emphasis of nearly 70 works, water colors, lithographs and paintings.
DEBORAH SENGL
In her paintings, drawings and objects, the Viennese artist Deborah Sengl explores the topics of camouflage and dissimulation, of mask and simulacrum. In the hybrid animals of her series “Ertarnungen”, the hunter assumes the form of his prey. Whether her creations should be considered fairy-tale beings or rather ironical comments on the state of gene-technology and societal role-playing depends mostly on the beholder’s point of view.
> Deborah Sengl
Acryl on Acrylic plate, 100x200 cm, 2009
OLIVER DORFER
In the 90s, Oliver Dorfer was known for his archaic work, pictures with dark configurations on gypsum. In these pictures, figurative and abstract signs form an artistic syntax. Fragments become self-willed storytellers. Dorfer began his artistic career as an autodidact .The new art works are made out of pigments and shellac on gypsum, which combine the durability of a fresco with forms of the past. Coded elements, picture quotations and colored silhouettes are overlaid as on foils: a picture system between fiction and reality with stereotypes and visual codes. Dorfer utilizes a diverse range of picture resources, such as design, comics, photography and film. His new interpretation of pop art including different time layers resembles cinematic vision.
> Oliver Dorfer
DRAGO PERSIC
The artist (born in 1981 in Banja Luka, Bosnia) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and was nominated for the Strabag Artaward in 2006. Drago Persic leads us into a world of silence, retreat and irritation, into a world of black-and-white contrasts, fine grey values and sensitive intermediate tones. Persic’s paintings and films (like set photos of films from Alfred Hitchcock) show embarrassment and indecision in addition to their medial/technically determined coolness and intellect. Paired with a spark of melancholy erotic, they demand definition, other possibilities and levels.
Who could I be? This question arises in the peace before the storm. Drago Persic confronts us with a very intensive and courageous form of realistic painting, which portrays extremes, poses sense questions contains the unexpected.
drawing, collage /paper, 180 x 125 cm, 2005
CHRISTIAN SCHWARZWALD
The artist (born in 1971 in Salzburg, lives and works in BerIin) is well-known for his wall installations combining pictures and wall paintings, diagrams and design. The exhibition “The mute ones, the pigeons, the blind ones” took place in November 2005. Reproducibility, irritation and illusionism appear in his poetical and ephemeral concepts. The viewer is emotionally and physically integrated into the new area of experience, in which scurrile portraits of humans and animals on walls of wood as well as abstract samples are combined. His time-critical and contextual paintings convey a special atmosphere, a feeling for time and space.
ROBERT MUNTEAN
Robert Muntean (born in 1982 in Leoben, Styria) isolates moments from their action context. There is no history told in his pictures. He describes only one small instant. The human figure and its feelings are the focus of his paintings. During the procedure of painting, the pictures of his memory are in a process of reduction and abstraction. Everything unnecessary is omitted, the essence of the moment remains. Robert Muntean studied in Vienna (Hubert Schmalix) and Leipzig, and he lives and works in Berlin. In 2007, he was received the recognition award of the Strabag Artaward.
HELMUT DITSCH
With his hyper-realistic extreme landscapes, Helmut Ditsch (born 1962 in Buenos Aires) holds an outstanding position within contemporary painting. The extreme mountain climber who crossed glaciers and desert regions in solo attempts, transports his spiritual experience as a mountain climber into the medium of painting. He develops his large-format pictures in a long-lasting ritual working process. In addition to numerous international exhibitions and his presentation at the Austrian Galerie Belvedere 2002, three of his main works were shown in Kunsthalle Krems.
Inspired by the works of Gottfried Helnwein, the mountain climber and world traveler, as well as his Austrian roots, Helmut Ditsch came to Vienna in 1988 in order to study at the academy of Fine Arts. His extreme representations of mountains, glaciers and deserts show the changes of nature and perception. Nature, in where kitsch and art unite in the sense of a photo-realistic whole, is a place of large feelings, of passing beauty and vital experience. The 9-meter-long picture “The last day” shows the glacier of the Perito Moreno in Patagonia at the southernmost point of the continent, looking like the end of the world.
FRANZ RINGEL
Franz Ringel (born 1940 in Graz, lives and works in Vienna) has held a firm place within the Austrian art scene since the 60s. Archetypal motifs of life and death, eroticism and suffering determine his figurative, expressive work. Consistent topics of his psychological art are fear and threat, just like the confrontation of consciousness and unconscious. In 1968, he became a member of the Viennese Secession, where he was a founding member of the now legendary group “Wirklichkeiten" (Realities). On the invitation of Jean Dubuffet, Ringel worked from 1972 to 1973 in Paris. Numerous prizes, such as the Theodor Körner Prize, the Appreciation Prize for Art of the Federal Ministry and the Painting and Graphic Prize of the city of Vienna, made Ringel a hallmark of the Austrian cultural life.
OTTO ZITKO
Zitko was born 1959 in Linz, Upper Austria and studied from 1977-82 at the University of Applied Art in Vienna in the class of P. Weibel and H. Tasquil. At the end of the 80s he abandoned conventional painting and dedicated himself to new principles. Since then, he has worked on monumental and nevertheless meager wall paintings. One could call the artistic work of Otto Zitko the attempt at a balancing act between fundamental contrasts. He follows nomadic principles and makes space-seizing gestures, a two-dimensional lineament set into existing areas. He literally marks a way within labyrinths and networks, which creates an idea of temporal dimension. He belongs to the group of painters "New Wild Painting" of the 80s. Zitko has painted comparably expressive pictures, in which impressions of nature were retained. Later, he selected glass and aluminum plates as image carriers. His work was dominated by the concept of the graphic gesture. Otto Zitko lives and works in Vienna.
JOSEF MIKL
The Austrian painter Josef Mikl, born 1929 in Vienna, belongs to a generation of artists who are responsible for the development of abstract painting in Austria since the 50s. Josef Mikl attended the Graphic Arts School in Vienna (1946 to 1948) and studied until 1955 at the Academy of Fine Arts (class of Dobrovsky). In 1956, Mikl joined the group of Gallery Nächst St. Stefan together with the artists Hollegha, Prachensky and Rainer. The head of this group was Monsignor Otto Mauer. From 1951 - 55, he was a member of the international Art Club. As a passionate draftsman, Mikl made sketches, costumes and church windows. Ten years after the establishment of the group of Gallery Nächst St. Stefan, he represented Austria at the Biennale in Venice 1968. In 1969, Mikl took over the master school for painting and nature studies at the Academy of Fine Arts. The determining topic in Mikls Oeuvre is always the body with its abstract forms and color play. Of great importance are Mikls large-sized works, for example the large cover picture (404 square meters) and 22 murals (214 square meters) for the Redoutensaal in the Viennese Hofburg. Mikl died in Vienna in 2008.
> Galerie Walker
SONJA GANGL
Sonja Gangl (born in 1965 in Graz, 1984-1992 studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and University for Applied Arts in Vienna, lives and works in Vienna) predominantly works in the media of photography, video and computer. She connects these sources with classical media such as design and painting.
The reciprocal effect between the photographic and pictorial structures of her work places the artist into conflict not only with regard to form but also content. The content-based connections and confrontations between perspective and voyeurism, desire and consumption, sexuality and disembodied physicality are fused by Sonja Gangl into a very modern extension of the pictorial and graphic processing of photographic material. Sonja Gangl also worked on precise drawings (series as “the end”) – they illustrate film endings, the connection of different media.
> Sonja Gangl
BRUNO GIRONCOLI
In the seventies, design acquired an increasingly independent value in Gironcoli’s oeuvre (born in 1936 in Villach, lives and works in Vienna). Gironcoli formulates ideas and expands the inventory of his sculptures: ears, grapes/clusters, tubs, combs, spoons, plates, gas valves and hoses, toilets, machines, embryos, men, dogs and frequently faceless shapes populate this world of objects.
More information about Bruno Gironcoli is available under GIRONCOLI - KRISTALL.
> Gironcoli Museum Herberstein
> Galerie Walker
> Galerie Thoman > Galerie Hofstätter
JAN SERYCH
Jan Šerıch was born in 1972 in Prague. He studied at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts from 1992 – 1998 in the studios of print-making (J. Lindovskı), new media (M. Bielickı) and painting (V. Skrepl). He is a member of the artist group BJ (Bezhlavı jezdec/Headless Horseman), established in 1996 together with fellow Academy students Josef Bolf, Ján Manèuška and Tomáš Vanìk. He was short listed as a finalist for the prestigious Jindøich Chalupeckı Award both in 2003 and 2005. 2009 he was nominated for the Strabag Artaward International.
Jan Šerıchs paintings, objects and videos function as conceptual trompe-l’oeil. He has created a formal abstract language derived from geometric tendencies in painting and typography. He deforms constructivist aesthetics, presenting characters depleted of significance. Symmetrical geometric or typographic shapes are exposed as multi-purpose covers meant for recycling and obsessional observations. Šerıch both simulates and mocks self-imposed rules and aesthetics, creating his own personal system of organized distance.
acrylic / canvas, 100 x 150 cm, 2009
ANSELM GLÜCK
Anselm Glück, born in 1950 in Linz, Upper Austria, has worked since 1978 as an artist and writer in Vienna. The artist - in earlier times regarded as a difficult outsider - has conquered the Austrian art market in the last few years. His first museum exhibitions took place in the Neue Galerie Linz. His books and singular performances reflect absurdity, ambiguity and vital questions in funny and ironical wordplay. The Strabag Artcollection contains over thirty works (painting and painted cubes) from all periods of his work. Glück’s work shows the human universe in a singular, poetic picture language. Multicolored heads, lines and figure fragments appear playful and floating as in a world theater on a monochromatic background.