Eduard Angeli

Biography

Eduard Angeli was born in Vienna in 1942. From 1960 to 1965 he studied painting with Robin Christian Andersen at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and history at the university. After graduating, he lived in Istanbul for six years, where he held a visiting professorship at the Academy of Applied Arts from 1967. In 1971 he returned to Vienna with his family. Since 2002 he lives and paints at the Lido in Venice most of the year. Since spring 2020, he has also moved into a new, large studio in Stollberg in the Wienerwald.

After beginnings in the gestural-expressive, in this period Angeli is attributed to the group "Realities" around Franz Ringel, Peter Pongratz, Wolfgang Herzig, Kurt Kocherscheidt and Martha Jungwirth, his painting becomes calmer and the figural disappears more and more. From then on, human existence is merely glimpsed in civilized set pieces. The water and the vastness of the Venetian lagoon in the most varied light and weather situations becomes a defining theme. An unbelievable calm emanates from these pictures, which is able to unfold a magical attraction, especially in our hectic world. At the same time, the artist inspires with his unbelievable feeling for a luminous colorfulness, for soft color gradients and light-filled pictorial spaces, reminiscent of the color field painting of a Mark Rothko.

His artistic work, which has been awarded several prizes (including the Golden Medal of Honor for Services to the Province of Vienna in 2003), is marked by major exhibition activity in Austria and abroad; among others, his works have been shown several times at the Albertina in Vienna, as in a major retrospective on the occasion of his 75th birthday. In the spring of 2023, the East Gallery of the Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach will host the exhibition "Eduard Angeli. Cities on Water".

"The nature that surrounds us is so diverse, so chaotic. To reproduce it as it is is simply not possible. You have to find an order, you have to bring about a reduction in order to be able to focus all these impressions at all, otherwise it's impossible to grasp what's all around. That means you have to concentrate on essential things, you have to filter out what is important for you as a person, and that means making order." (Eduard Angeli, Stollberg 2022)