Franz Grabmayr’s compelling body of work is rooted in an almost symbiotic connection between an intense experience of nature, physical immediacy and a radical material aesthetic. In his personal realm of experience—the self-imposed seclusion of the Waldviertel region and his Carinthian homeland—he meticulously studied the elemental forces of nature: the blazing fire of burning rootstocks, which he circled whilst painting from a tractor trailer converted into a ‘mobile studio’, or the surging waters of the Kamp, which he masterfully captured on canvas whilst balancing on smooth rocks in the middle of the river. Grabmayr focused on real sand pits and harvested grain fields with sheaves of grain with the same artistic obsession and no less passion. The pictorial metamorphosis of the natural model, of the energy inherent in it, into a materially powerful, expressive and increasingly abstract pictorial object was always a central artistic concern for him. Pigments applied in impasto, in layers centimetres thick, thickened with linseed oil and mixed with eggs, sometimes also sand, coke ash or straw to form a pasty mass, evoke three dimensional, relief-like colour structures that refract light and shadow and can be experienced tactilely.

Alongside powerful, archaic, sculptural landscape reliefs created from richly layered, carefully balanced paint, from the early 1970s (up to the winter of 2011) he produced airy, light watercolours and gouaches of dancing models, painted with thin glazes of coloured ink. Through ecstatic, gestural expression, Franz Grabmayr transformed the actual subject of the painting—the expressive movement of dance—into dynamic, largely abstract ink drawings. Whether in his winter studio at Vienna’s Karl-Marx-Hof or during the 1970s up to and including 1982 at the Vienna State Opera, and occasionally in connection with nocturnal fire performances: movement was Grabmayr’s pronounced elixir of life.
“I paint the movement. Then it is dance! Dance is dynamism!”
In Austrian post-war art, the uncompromising, painterly oeuvre of Franz Grabmayr (1927–2015)—developed with unusual perseverance from a direct observation of nature—has occupied a unique position not just since the major retrospective at the Vienna Albertina in 2024.