Jakob Gasteiger

Biography

Jakob Gasteiger, born in 1953, studied at the Mozarteum, the University of Music and Performing Arts in his hometown, Salzburg, from 1970 to 1974.
Since then he has received numerous awards, including the Anton Faistauer Prize for Painting and, in 2019, the Grand Decoration of Honor for Services to the Province of Lower Austria, his second home besides Vienna. Solo exhibitions have been dedicated to him regularly in Austria and abroad since 1983, and he has been represented in numerous group exhibitions in Germany, Spain, the USA, Canada and Japan, among others. The artist currently lives and works in Vienna and the Weinviertel region.

"In a country that has devoted itself to the pathos of expressionism for over a century, from Schiele to Brus and Rainer, Hollegha, Brandl and Scheibl, Jakob Gasteiger is the calming pole, the clear-sighted analyst in this sea of emotions."¹

Within postradical painting he occupies an intriguing position. Like the representatives of Minimal Art, he constantly rejects suggestions from the visible world that lead into the figurative, and thus also an iconographic or symbolic interpretability of his pictorial content. Even though many of his works are designed in monochrome, a "meaningful charge"² of this monochrome in the sense of Yves Klein is alien to him. With his expansive application of colour, he is following in the tradition of Donald Judd or Sol LeWitt, but the spatial effect of his works is much more subtle. His paintings give order to a space and reshape it with their squeegee-worked relief-like surfaces.

With limited parameters, Jakob Gasteiger creates works of "aesthetic richness" and "exciting variety"³. He plays with formats - horizontally expansive rectangles, tondi or squares – as well as textures and structures. The squeegees - homemade combs that are his preferred painting tool - can leave fine or sharp-edged, widely spaced furrows in the wet paint. Colour pigments obtain a tremendous shine from the addition of glass sand, aluminium or copper powder. Jakob Gasteiger works with oil and acrylic, creating matte or glossy surfaces with natural pigments or garish neon colours. With somnambulistic certainty, one work flows into the next. In the resulting series, which are characterized by related formats and same materials, he "demonstrates all nuances of conception"⁴. Although his works are created lying on the floor, when completed they are hung with reading directions given by the structures of the combed pigments, as the viewer's eye follows the ridges or undulating curvatures.

The unbelievable pastosity and expansive grandeur of the surfaces push painting to the border of the sculptural; the artist himself refers to his works as "Bildobjekte"⁵, reflecting on the medium of painting and reinventing it through all its components.

¹Klaus Albrecht Schröder (ed.), Jakob Gasteiger. Post-Radical Painting, exhibition catalog, Albertina, Vienna 2021, p. 15.
²ebd., p. 12.
³ebd., p. 12.
⁴ebd., p. 12.
⁵Jakob Gasteiger in conversation with Sophie Cieslar on June 21, 2017.