Wilfried Kirschl

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Wilfried Kirschl in the studio, 1967

Wilfried Kirschl (born April 27, 1930 in Wörgl ; † January 28, 2010 in Innsbruck ) was an Austrian painter and art journalist.

From 1948 to 1952 he studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts under Josef Dobrowsky and Herbert Boeckl and in 1957 at the Académie André Lhote in Paris.

life and work

Niche Still Life II, 1964
Imeroviglion, Santorini, 1966

Wilfried Kirschl was born in 1930 as the youngest of three children into a Wörgl merchant family. After his parents separated, he moved to Innsbruck in 1938 with his mother, the sister of the painter and sculptor Sepp Orgler (1911–1943).

During the years of the Vienna Academy from 1948 to 1952, Herbert Boeckl as head of the evening act provided decisive impulses, while Kirschl's relationship with Josef Dobrowsky , who directed his painting class, remained artistically rather distant. From 1950 the young painter worked in the tower studio, which Max Weiler later moved into, in a joint studio with Rudolf Schönwald and Alfred Hrdlicka .

Immediately after completing his studies, stays in France (including Arles and Saint-Rémy-de-Provence , 1952/1953) inspired an intensive examination of post-impressionist models, which were clearly reflected in the style and color of the early work of the 1950s. From the beginning, landscape, architectural landscape and still life were the preferred subjects, in the early years a series of portraits of personalities of the Tyrolean intellectual life in the vicinity of the Brenner district was also created .

Formal experiments under the influence of the cubist André Lhote , at whose Académie Lhote Kirschl studied at the suggestion of Gerhild Diesner in 1957 , led to a distinct approach in the late 1950s / early 1960s that was reduced in terms of form language and also reserved in terms of color. Under the impression of the special lighting conditions in the countries of the Mediterranean region (including Italy, Greece, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Tunisia), which the artist repeatedly toured from 1960, his palette brightened. Questions about the refraction of light and the structure of form on which the image is based increasingly determined his painting; his work revolved around the trinity of “space, light and volume”, which he also tried to approach during the very productive 1960s in depictions of landscape and architectural space as in several series of quasi-monochrome still lifes.

After several study stays in Greece (between 1966 and 1973) as well as in New York City (1967/1968) and Morocco (1968), where more colored works were again produced, Kirschl devoted himself almost exclusively to curatorial and writing activities for a few years in the 1970s .

It was not until 1980 that oil paintings began to appear again alongside graphic works. The architectural landscapes and still lifes of this very productive, mature creative phase of the 1980s and 1990s form a separate, very homogeneous group of works, which is characterized by the contrast of formal rigor and finely modulated, light pastel colors.

He is buried in the Innsbruck-Mühlau cemetery.

Journalistic and curatorial activity

Kirschl co-founded the gallery in the Taxispalais Innsbruck in 1964 and curated numerous exhibitions with Paul Flora , Oswald Oberhuber and Peter Weiermair . As an author and art journalist, he devoted himself, among other things, to researching the work and life of the Tyrolean painters Albin Egger-Lienz and Carl Moser .

Works in public space

  • 1953: Sgraffito of the Resurrection of Christ on the memorial chapel in the new St. Anton am Arlberg cemetery
  • 1965–1967: three choir windows of the Heiligkreuzkirche in Hall in Tirol
  • Wall mosaics at the elementary school in Wörgl

Awards

Publications

  • Wilfried Kirschl (monograph). Vienna: Edition Tusch, 1980.
  • Wilfried Kirschl. Works from 1950 to 1996. (exhibition catalog). Innsbruck: Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, 1997

literature

  • Martin Kolozs (Ed.): Wilfried Kirschl - artist, collector, cultural mediator (= Tyrolean identities, vol. 11). Cyrene, Innsbruck 2010.

Web links

Commons : Wilfried Kirschl  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dehio Tirol 1980 , p. 662.
  2. ↑ Dehio Tirol 1980, p. 314.
  3. ↑ List of listed objects in Wörgl
personal data
SURNAME Kirschl, Wilfried
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian painter and publicist
DATE OF BIRTH April 27, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Wörgl , Tyrol , Austria
DATE OF DEATH January 28, 2010
Place of death Innsbruck , Tyrol , Austria