Siegfried Anzinger

Siegfried Anzinger works in the mediums of painting, drawing, and sculpture in clay and terracotta, but is primarily recognized as a painter. His works are characterized by dynamism and spontaneity. The artist is considered a key representative of the Austrian ​“Neue Wilde” movement of the 1980s, whose spontaneous, vigorous compositions engage with representational subjects. While this early phase was still strongly marked by expressiveness, Anzinger’s work evolved over time into an increasingly referential visual repertoire drawing on art-historical traditions and everyday motifs.

For Anzinger, the focus is less on the motifs themselves and more on their function within the painting. The pictorial elements — which he sometimes self-deprecatingly refers to as ​“nonsense content” — serve as a starting point for further exploring the possibilities of painting and testing traditional modes of representation through the composition of moving figures and spatial situations. With an awareness of art-historical techniques, he combines various painterly means — from the intrinsic value of color as a monochromatic surface to the fragile outline that suggests rather than defines.

He draws on the principle of the non-finito (Italian for ​“unfinished”), in which works are deliberately left unfinished — a concept reflected in his own technique. Anzinger repeatedly adds new layers of paint to his works and frequently works with thin, transparent glue paint, which cannot be corrected and demands a high degree of precision. If a painting process goes awry, the artist washes off the paint, creating a multi-layered surface that appears somewhat watery.

Siegfried Anzinger and Oswald Wiener were friends; a joint literary project of theirs never came to fruition. On display in the exhibition is a portrait of Wiener bearing his initials, O.W. He is depicted seated, his facial features suggested with just a few brushstrokes, while his head remains unpainted. This empty space can be read as a negative form: the seat of thought eludes representation. The chair on which Wiener sits is also left blank, causing figure and ground to shift into an unstable relationship and appear to merge partially. This weakens the spatial anchoring, creating the impression of an open, elusive continuum. This painterly reduction directs the gaze toward inner states and an understanding of the image that grasps what eludes representation rather than merely depicting it.

O.W., 2018
Glue paint on canvas
60 × 40 cm
Courtesy Ingrid Wiener, Kapfenstein