Gunter Damisch

 

 "Gunter Damisch (1958 - 2016 ) was an Austrian artist known for his lush paintings of rhizome-like forms and undulating lines. “My pictorial system is strongly guided by the idea of transformation and metamorphosis. These ambiguities fascinate me,” he once explained. Born on May 20, 1958 in Steyr, Austria, he went on to study under Arnulf Rainer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, during which time he was a member of the punk band Molto Brutto. After finishing school, Damisch began exhibiting his work and established himself in the Viennese contingent of the Neue Wilde movement, alongside Otto Zitko and Hubert Scheibl. In the decades that followed, the artist was the subject of exhibitions both in Austria and abroad. Damisch died on April 30, 2016 in Vienna, Austria. Today, his works are held in the collections of a number of Austrian museums, including the Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna, and the Museum Liaunig in Neuhaus."(artnet)
"Gunter Damisch works as a painter, draftsman and graphic designer but in recent years he has turned his attention increasingly to sculpture, developing a highly personal and complex cosmological view of the world. This world is inhabited by a large number of invented beings that can be ascribed to either a microcosmic biological or a macrocosmic spiritual world.
These beings drift in the streams of air, water, earth and fire emerging from a universe that has been subjected to a never-ending process of change by the creator. Gunter Damisch’s “Flämmler”, lucid amblers between time and space, can be seen in this context as metaphors for the fleetingness of human existence, at least for its consummation in a processual dimension."(artsper.com)

 

 

Oldrich Kulhanek - Graphics

Oldrich Kulhanek (26 February 1940 – 28 January 2013) was a Czech painter, graphic designer, illustrator, stage designer and pedagogue. Kulhánek created the design for the current Czech banknotes and postage stamps.Kulhánek was born in Prague. Beginning in 1958, he studied at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, in the atelier of Karel Svolinský. He graduated in 1964, with the cycles of illustrations to the poetry of Vladimír Holan  and Christian Morgenstern (The Gallows Songs).In 1971 he was arrested by the StB (the Czechoslovak Secret Police) and imprisoned for "defamation of the allied socialist states". In a graphic cycle created from 1968 to 1971, he included "a distorted portrait of Joseph Stalin, perforated five-pointed red stars or joyful faces of socialist workers turned into a hideous grin". The graphics were identified as "ideologically dangerous" and condemned to destruction. Kulhánek spent a month in prison and was interrogated regularly for next two years. He was prohibited from publishing.In the 1980s, he created lithographs inspired by the development of the human body. Following the Velvet Revolution, he visited the USA and attended the Lithographic Workshop in Los Angeles. He also often travelled to Belgium, to study the works of old masters.Wikipedia

Ernst Wilhelm Nay - Art Informel

Ernst Wilhelm Nay was a German painter known for his association with the Art Informel movement and post-World War II artists such as Karel Appel, Jean Dubuffet, and Alberto Burri. Despite working exclusively in abstraction, Nay’s distinctive Expressionistic use of color and textile-like patterning show the influence of representational painters like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and the Henri Matisse. Born on June 1, 1911 in Berlin, Germany, he went on to study under Karl Hofer at the Berlin Art Academy. Nay was on track for a successful career in Germany, until the Nazi regime labeled his work as Degenerate, thereby making it illegal for him to show or even produce artworks. After being conscripted into the Nazi army, the artist served in France where he was able to secretly paint in a friend’s sculpture studio. It was not until a decade after the war with his participation in the 1956 Venice Biennale that Nay made a breakthrough into the international art scene. Today, his works are in the collections of the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Tate Modern in London, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, among others. he died on April 8, 1968 in Cologne, Germany.(artnet )

Mike Todd

my website

Painting & Sculpture