GUNTER DAMISCH

We thank Ms. Maria Damisch for her confirmation of authenticity, September 2017.

Provenance: By descent to the present owner, private collection Switzerland.

“Points in transition, worlds hovering, sticks upwards and downwards, sometimes lingering, dividing space and surfaces, next to one another in the centre." Gunter Damisch


The Austrian artist Gunter Damisch, born in Steyr in 1958, studied painting and graphic art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna under Maximilian Melcher and Arnulf Rainer from 1978 to 1983. As a member of “Neuer Wilde” he first found his place amongst the young Viennese painters. In 1992 he took on a visiting professorship at the Academy and some years later became full professor of graphic art and printing technique. Gunter Damisch, whose life was inextricably bound with the Academy, became ill and died prematurely in 2016. He was one of the most important international exponents of contemporary art in Austria.

In his paintings Gunter Damisch looks for the intervals between New Wave and classic art history. For him, to reach the abstract is an elevated objective. He tries to find a highly expressive yet half-abstract “Ungegenständlichkeit” (non-representational state) in his pictures. In his canvases he develops worlds in which he applies the oil paints always on top of one another. The impastoed oil becomes a formal quality in his work. His heavy canvases form island-like structures and forms, which could have come from space or from under the microscope. These complexities arise and disappear, they appear to develop and to cluster, against a cosmos-like background.

The two works presented here from 1989 “Welt, Weg und Feld” and “Nachtstrom – Nachtel” belong to his most important series of paintings and are excellent examples of what the artist sought to achieve: “Where there is nothing left, then everything can be, the lost gives birth to the new”.