Untitled 1962
PVC, oil, gouache and gold varnish on wood
75,4 x 41,8 cm
signed lower middle: Bischoffshausen
verso dated: PARIS (19)62
on the reverse/verso adhesive label des Künstlers
Provenance
private collection Carinthia (directly from the artist)
Literature
Vgl.: Arnulf Rohsmann, Bischoffshausen. Struktur-Monochromie-Reduktion, Klagenfurt 1991, ill S. 148
The important early work, shown opposite, was created in Paris in 1962, in the years in which Hans Bischoffshausen caused a sensation internationally as a representative of monochrome painting. Here the artist combines monochrome color surfaces with relief-like elements, "ribs," as he calls them. He is concerned on the one hand with a "purification of the artistic pictorial space of all prefabricated emotional values from tubes and pots of color" and a rejection of any color symbolism, and on the other hand with a "striving for the absolute" . The colors black and gold do not stand for darkness and radiance, they are darkness and radiance, non-light and light. Here "they represent the highest level of abstraction in the color realm" . With pictures like these Hans Bischoffshausen proves to be one of the most uncompromising and fascinating artist personalities in Austria.
