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Biography

(b Baden, 8 Dec 1929). Austrian painter, printmaker and photographer. He began painting as a self-taught artist in the mid-1940s, after leaving school, and first came into contact with contemporary art through a British Council exhibition in 1947 that included work by Paul Nash, Francis Bacon, Stanley Spencer, Henry Moore and Edward Burra. Around this time he produced his first portraits, such as Rainer Dying (pencil, 1949; Vienna, Helmut Weis priv. col., see 1984 exh. ... (view more)

Grove Art excerpts - Electronic ©2003, Oxford Art Online

(b Baden, 8 Dec 1929). Austrian painter, printmaker and photographer. He began painting as a self-taught artist in the mid-1940s, after leaving school, and first came into contact with contemporary art through a British Council exhibition in 1947 that included work by Paul Nash, Francis Bacon, Stanley Spencer, Henry Moore and Edward Burra. Around this time he produced his first portraits, such as Rainer Dying (pencil, 1949; Vienna, Helmut Weis priv. col., see 1984 exh. cat., p. 10). While attending the Staatsgewerbeschule at Villach from 1947 to 1949 he became interested in theories of Surrealism. He had almost no academic training as an artist, leaving the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna in 1949 after only one day because of an argument with a teacher, and lasting little longer at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna in 1950. From 1948 to 1951 he produced Surrealistic drawings representing underwater scenes and mystical forms, rendering these fantastic images in pencil as a densely worked surface. In 1950 he produced the first of his prints; over the next 20 years he explored a variety of media, including etching, drypoint, lithography and screenprinting. In works such as Winnetou (pencil, 920*745 mm, 1950; see 1988 exh. cat., p. 10) he explored microstructures and sought to expose repressed impulses in defiance of bourgeois hypocrisy. Deeply suspicious of rationality, he investigated the potential of dreams, madness and the subconscious; to these ends he co-founded the Hundsgruppe, whose members also included Ernst Fuchs, under the influence of French Surrealism in 1950.  (hide)

Grove Art excerpts - Electronic ©2003, Oxford Art Online

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