Austrian Art Brut draughtsman, born on 5 October 1919 in Eggendorf am Wagram (Lower Austria), died on 23 September 2008. He belongs to the group of Gugging artists.
Life
The third of seven children, he grew up on a small farm and vineyard. After primary school he trained as a baker, up to master level. Conscripted into the German army in 1940, he was taken prisoner by the Americans. A year after the end of the war he took over the family farm as a winegrower.
He first saw a psychiatrist in 1957, then worked again as a baker. He later became a permanent patient of the Gugging psychiatric hospital near Vienna (in 1961 according to the Museum Gugging, in 1967 according to the Collection de l’Art Brut). In 1982 he joined the group of residents of the centre for art and psychotherapy founded by the psychiatrist Leo Navratil, today’s House of Artists (Haus der Künstler).
The work
It was through contact with the artistic activity of the House of Artists that he began to draw, in pencil and graphite: animals, objects, people caught at their trades. From 1984 he introduced coloured pencils, mostly warm yellows and browns, and his compositions became dense and tightly packed.
At the end of the 1980s, writing invaded the sheet: a calligraphed text on lines he drew himself, divided into numbered sections to show the reading order. In the end the text dominated, with the image serving only as illustration. His comments, often political, social or religious, speak of family, illness, farming, machines, Catholicism and above all Austria, which he evokes as a patriot without refraining from denouncing its injustices.
Exhibitions and collections
- 1983: exhibition of the Gugging artists at the Museum moderner Kunst, Vienna
- Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne