Franz Grabmayr. Opera 1970-1980: Cat. Vienna State Opera (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9783864424489)

(1927- 2015) was an Austrian artist and representative of abstract painting from 1965 until his death. Encouraged in his decision by his wife, Grabmayr ended his career as a teacher in 1962 to devote himself entirely to painting. After graduating from the Academy under Herbert Boeckl in 1964, he moved into a simple painter's quarters in the Waldviertel region of Lower Austria in the same year, which became his adopted home for the rest of his life. Here, in complete seclusion, he created his first landscape paintings in the midst of nature. From 1967 to 1969, he was Gustav Hessing's assistant at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. In 1970, he received a scholarship from the Austrian federal government, which enabled him to spend six months studying in Venice. Inspired by a pantomime that made him enthusiastic about the moving body, he began to paint his first " dance pictures" at the end of the 1960s: In winter in his studio in Vienna's Karl-Marx-Hof or at the Vienna State Opera during rehearsals and performances of the ballet (until 1982), in summer in the Waldviertel. In nature, Grabmayr discovered further motifs that he focused on in his landscape painting. In the 1980s, Franz Grabmayr developed his " mobile workshop" he had a tractor drive him around his motifs, stood on the trailer with his easel and paint buckets and applied up to 100 kg of paint to the canvas with a palette knife. He also created night-time fire paintings, pictures with charred rootstocks as well as sand and ash paintings. Franz Grabmayr continued to develop his wild dance and landscape painting unwaveringly and continuously, driving his " traveling workshop" around large, blazing fireplaces, in front of which nude models often danced freely and naked. " The fire has such a ferocity, you have to counter it with the same power. I threw the paint from the bucket onto the canvas: the power and wildness of the fire and my power and wildness on the canvas. You can't just paint finely with a brush," he himself described these powerful adventures. (Vienna, 1957) is an art historian and curator, he is now professor at the academy in Dusseldorf for art history. His career started 1991 until 1993 as Federal curator of Austria and continued as a journalist in France for the German monthly " art" . Before he became 2004 director of the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, he was 1998 co-curator of Manifesta together with Maria Lind and Barbara Vanderlinden. His successful exhibtions at Deichtorhallen - amongst others he was showing Michel Majerus, Jonathan Meese, Hans Haacke, Erwin Wurm, Georg Baselitz, Fischli & Weiss, and Stephan Balkenhol - lead him to the engagement as intendant of the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepulik Deutschland in Bonn. Since 2012, he is now professor at the Academy in D? sseldorf for Art and Public.