Product Description
Hubert Schmalix “Häuserbild” Oil on Canvas 1989
HUBERT SCHMALIX (1952-) Austria
Häuserbild 1989
Oil on canvas
Signed and dated on back: Schmalix 89
Exhibited: Galerie Krinzinger Vienna 1990 (Solo exhibition)
Illustrated: Nach Schiele, Tobias G. Natter and Thomas Trummer (Köln, Germany: Atelier Augarten, DuMont, 2006), p 142.
Provenance: Private Collection Vienna
For related works by Hubert Schmalix see: Hubert Schmalix, Lóránd Hegyi exhibition catalog (Museum Moderner Kunst StiftungLudwig Wien) November 19, 1994 – January 1995.
H: 85” x W: 49”
Hubert Schmalix was born in Graz, Austria, on December 17, 1952 and studied at the Vienna Art Academy from 1971 to 1976. By 1979 Schmalix was showing work at the forward-looking exhibition ‘Europa 79 – Kunst der 80er Jahre’ in Stuttgart. In 1983 the London Tate Gallery invited Schmalix to present work at ‘New Art’, an important survey of contemporary art. Schmalix has become well-known world-wide as an exponent of ‘New Art’, working with a retrospective glance at both classical art history and modern art. Schmalix focuses on the world of things and the human figure. Although the expressive gesture was the dominant feature of his 1980s work, it yielded early in the 1990s to stringent tectonic composition. In 1984 Hubert Schmalix went to the Philippines and on to the US, moving to Los Angeles in 1987. In 1986-87 Schmalix taught at the Academy for the Decorative and Applied Arts in Vienna and from 1997 he has been a professor at the Vienna Art Academy. Schmalix is a visiting professor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). In 1993 his work was featured at the Venice Biennale and in 1998 he was awarded the Fine Art Prize of the City of Vienna. Schmalix has done several large fresco cycles in Salzburg and his work has been shown extensively at numerous international solo and group shows and most recently at Art Basel 2006.
The Kunstforum in Vienna is dedicating a major retrospective show to Hubert Schmalix from May 6th – July 12th, 2015.
“I’m not nervous or angry when I paint, but well rested and concentrated. Each stroke of the brush is important! I’ve painted a whole lot of beautiful pictures this way.” (Hubert Schmalix)
Hubert Schmalix “Häuserbild” Oil on Canvas 1989
KNOX MARTIN (1923-) USA
Eight 1958
Magna and oil on canvas
Signed: Knox Martin on lower left on front of canvas, Knox M on back of canvas
Marks: From: CORE, 38 Park Row, New York 38, NY, To: Martin, Knox, Eight, 1958, Magna/Oil, 30×40, 700. (paper label), Fischbach Gallery, 799 Madison Avenue, New York 21, Knox Martin, Eight, C.O.R.E., Price $700 (paper label), Mr. Ned L. Pines, 605 Park Ave., New York 21, NY (address label).
Exhibited: Fischbach Gallery, New York 1963; I. Jankowski Gallery, New York, 1975
Provenance: Personal Collection of the artist; Private Collection New York
Canvas: H: 40 1/4” x W: 26 1/4””
Framed: H: 52 3/8” x W: 38 3/8”
From 1957 to about 1964, the spirit of art in New York City was moving in directions for which Abstract Expressionism had not prepared us. By 1965, the strokes, swipes, drips, and splatters of New York painting had given way to cool, laconic representations of the most ordinary of ordinary objects. It was a transformation in artistic culture in which intellectual rewards replaced, or at least supplemented, visual ones, and the whole philosophical face of art was beginning to disclose itself in a particularly vivid way. I saw Knox Martin’s paintings as embodying this transformative moment. In them, I thought, the tension between the two rival philosophies of art could be felt. the way I saw them: they appeared at first glance to be collages, made of large, irregular, overlapping swatches of patterned cloth. Some of the swatches were striped, some appeared to be decorated with circles. It must be conceded that stripes and circles belong to the vocabulary of one kind of abstract art, while the irregular shapes, which felt as though they had been torn from bolts of material, belonged to another.
So one might properly claim that Martin was synthesizing an expressionist abstraction with a geometrical one. For me, however, Knox’s stripes and circles evoked the life of the circus: the striped tents, the loudly patterned costume of clowns. And Martin’s colors—pistachio, raspberry, banana—were festive and impudent. That is why I felt that the paintings referred to vernacular reality, as much so as Campbell Soup cans or Coca Cola bottles. The circus was a recurring theme in modernist art, and I thought it appropriate for late modernist painting to reduce the circus to patterned rags expressive of its raucous gaiety.