Herbert Gurschner
The following artworks are for sale
Biography
Herbert Gurschner's talent as a painter took him to the Kunstgewerbliche Fachschule in Innsbruck and Walter Thor's private painting school at an early age, before he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in 1918. Around 1920, the young artist commuted between Munich and Innsbruck and took part in numerous exhibitions. During this time, he also became close friends with Ernst Nepo, Alphons Schnegg and Rudolf Lehnert, all artists of the “Mühlau Circle”. In 1924, he married Ella Dolores Erskine, an English aristocrat several years his senior, who provided him with important contacts to English artists and collectors. During these years, the young artist undertook extensive trips to Italy, often lasting months. In 1928, Gurschner was invited as a guest exhibitor to the Italian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. From 1929, he exhibited at the renowned London Fine Art Society, which marked his artistic breakthrough in England. The good order situation enabled him to make further trips to France and Italy as well as a trip to the USA in a zeppelin.He spent the winter in Bermuda. He enjoyed further success in London with exhibitions at Agnew's and in New York at the Cooling Galleries. After the Second World War, Herbert Gurschner intensified his contacts with Austria again and regularly visited Innsbruck. Until his death, he remained very attached to his native Tyrol, which always served as the most important source of inspiration for his painting, despite his exhibition successes in England and America.
In the years around 1920, Hall in Tyrol was an important working area for Herbert Gurschner's (and numerous other Tyrolean painters such as Wilhelm Nicolaus, Theodor Prachensky and Oskar Mulley) itinerant art ventures. This is because the originally preserved medieval old town - with its pointed moat roofs, winding buildings and baroque façades - offered a rich reservoir of picturesque motifs. Capturing the scenic and urban-historical beauty of their Tyrolean homeland with a fresh, modern eye seemed to be the motto of these artists, and so new, often strictly geometric cityscapes were created, mostly in close-up compositions and peculiarly alienated colors. Often still influenced in style and coloration by the powerful artistic views of Albin Egger-Lienz, who can be apostrophized as the “forefather” of modern Tyrolean art¹, Herbert Gurschner's work also shows an engagement with lingering secessionist and expressionist currents.
Claudia and Roland Widder (eds.), Herbert Gurschner, Innsbruck 2000, p. 38.
