Alfred Klinkan

Biography

Alfred Klinkan was born in Judenburg in 1950. He studied from 1970 to 1974 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna under Josef Mikl and Wolfgang Hollegha. Klinkan received a scholarship to study abroad at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in 1976/1977. There he met the young and ambitious gallery owner Adriaan Raemdonck, who offered him a much acclaimed exhibition platform at his Gallery De Zwarte Panter. From the beginning Klinkan drew attention to himself as an interesting and independent artist who could not be easily pigeonholed in the contemporary art scene. He moved to Munich in 1985 and set up a studio there. Alfred Klinkan’s pictures open up a private world populated with fantastic animals and fabulous creatures. These animals never appear on their own in the artist’s highly symbolic work. Their existence depends on their relationship with mankind, whether this should be in the form of physical union as allegorical beasts or in a largely peaceful co-existence between animals and humans. Alfred Klinkan is regarded as one of the foremost representatives of Neue Wilde painting that emerged at the beginning of the eighties especially in Germany and Austria.