Galerie Gmurzynska is showing a retrospective of the entire oeuvre of the legendary Austrian artist Christian Ludwig Attersee in its two Zurich exhibition spaces.
The exhibition brings together paintings and sculptures from the 1960s through to his latest, crossgenre paintings from today. Attersee’s independent and at the same time ground-breaking creative approach has survived through the forms of Viennese Actionism, Fluxus, international Pop and Dada, imaginatively infiltrating them with virtuoso technique and humorous innovations. His art has always had a special eye for motifs of consumption, love, male beauty and food.
Attersee’s works are generous, exciting, enriching stories for the viewer. Full of disarming eroticism and subversive humour, they transform and mix everything into twisted, seductive tales of highly sensual events. The artist captivates, entertains and surrounds the viewer with works bursting with bold colours and daring motifs. Max Hollein, Director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, describes Attersee’s work as follows: ‘An Attersee painting is always a celebration, an event, a boiling over with a new visual language, an inventive symbolism of life, love and nature. His paintings are meant to be seen, smelled, tasted and loved.’
The artist is primarily regarded as one of the leading representatives of figurative painting in Europe in the last 50 years, as a lone fighter in almost all areas of the visual arts, as a counterpart to Viennese Actionism and as the founder of ‘Neue Österreichische Malerei”.