Wolfgang Walkensteiner is an artist through and through – with heart and soul and in mind. Over almost five decades he has created an œuvre which not only stands out through its extent and variety, but is particularly impressive in its sheer intensity, which evinces his amazing creativity, his real passion for creating. This intensity conveys Wolfgang Walkensteiner‘s view of art and life as directly connected, and for the artist (nolens volens) congruent, demonstrating that all thought, all actions ultimately result in the artistic process or, vice versa, originate in it. It also shows that body and soul are not only in dialogue, but can also keep pace with each other. The theory expressed in Walkensteiner‘s work does not lead to over-cerebrality, nor do pure emotion and physical expression – the artistic gesture – predominate. Philosophically, Apollonian and Dionysian nature act in unison, both equally fostered and cultivated by the artist. In his work, both these poles claim their rights; they are mutually dependent and related. This dual constellation is presumably also responsible for the apparent inhomogeneity and the consequent striking diversity of his œuvre. The thoughts guide the artistic work, which in turn allows the mind to develop – a quasi dialectic cognitive process, the progress of which is evident through constantly new topics, dealt with through cycles of artworks.1 The changing topics stand in direct relation to his current personal life situation and are based on specific experiences of the artist, to which he turns his attention. It is, however, not the outside world, not the tangible things of life, that determine the creative process, but rather the intellectual debate which finds its subjects in concrete reality. Philosophy, mythology, history and literature – these provide the inspiration for Wolfgang Walkensteiner‘s work – their concerns are also his. On this basis, the artist has developed over past decades an extensive, heterogeneous œuvre – with emphasis on the media of painting, graphic arts and installations – which can be structured into different work phases, clearly defined by technical as well as formal aspects. The constant throughout all these changes has always been – since the artist‘s period of orientation in the 1970s, in search of his personal direction within the broad field of art – the kind of topics he chooses to explore. In a profoundly philosophical existential and ontological discourse, his ideas (in the spirit of Heideggerian analysis) constantly revolve around the fundamental questions of human existence – his own as well as existence in general, questions of being flung into this world, of being in the here and now, with all its requirements and conditions. This search for meaning occupies the artist, guides him, and is articulated in his artistic activities as he attempts to approach reality (and truth). The formal and technical aspects, never an end in themselves, are subordinate to these matters. The question of representationalism or abstraction is obsolete, for what we are talking about here is not methodology or mimesis, but the artistic and philosophical exploration of reality in the creative act, the questioning of existence, of being, entity, things, concepts, not of external apprehension, but of comprehension from the very nucleus outwards. In this respect, current ideas and trends in contemporary art have never been of great significance in Walkensteiner‘s work; he cannot be categorised. He was able, he had to and still has to rely on his subjective path, for it is not primarily a question of the concerns of painting – rather, the artist puts the potential of the medium at the service of his own concern. Art is his tool for understanding the world, for lending structure to reality, and of course, as he emphasises, technical skill and consequent assurance in its use are indispensable. Wolfgang Walkensteiner‘s early work can be placed in the time frame from the late 1960s until about 1980. Developed against the background of Conceptual Art, Arte Povera, Minimal and Nouveau Realisme, together with influences from his teacher Max Weiler‘s painting, it is marked by intensive search and experiment in order to transcend various influential artistic models, and by exploration of the various techniques, media and methods used in contemporary art (ranging from graphic arts through painting, photography and object art to room installation and performance). Clearly influenced by current Conceptual trends, reinforced by the direct confrontation with the art of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys during the artist‘s participation in the 1976 Venice Biennale, in this early period, the work is often predominated by the artist‘s intellectual enquiry, particularly those works which go beyond drawing and painting. Walkensteiner integrates photographic documents and also textual elements which he still frequently uses. Objects or narrations which were originally illustrated on paper or canvas are now spatially realised or staged. By means of trivial „simple materials“ and mundane things in restrained minimalist installations, in a sensuously suggestive and associative way or in performative actions, ideas are conveyed, connections established, meaning created and also stories told. The works of this period already show that Wolfgang Walkensteiner‘s work is strongly subjective in content and that the artist focuses on his individual experience and thought, in order to visualise and express his identity, his own idea and in particular his personal concept of life and the world. In sensitive, almost fragile drawings and paintings, Walkensteiner designs peculiar, poetic, magical, spiritually meditative, fantastically surreal landscapes and spaces of enigmatic signs and symbolic forms, mysterious, undefined allegories, taut, deserted and unfathomable, frequently associated with the unconscious, with dream worlds and myths – „questioning reality“ in the sense of the „individual mythologies“ of the 1960s, based more on „introspection“ than on the exploration of the real, material world. These early artistic works were still influenced by Far Eastern cultures, Indian philosophy and religion, which Walkensteiner studied and from which he was not to critically dissociated himself until the mid-1970s. At the same time, after the artist settled in rural secluded Hagenberg in Lower Austria, he began a period of intensive landscape study, processing Max Weiler‘s artistic impressions in painting. There emerged emphatic approaches, sensitive, evocative, mystical interpretations of nature – animated nature which the artist attempts to comprehend in its very essence – in delicate pencil drawings, filigree, translucent watercolours and colour-intensive tempera paintings, which owe much to Weiler‘s characteristic artistic formal vocabulary as well as to his pantheist perception of nature. In the second half of the 1980s, there followed expressive, abstract pictures, which are obviously derived from the landscape paintings, but which can, however, only be classified in this genre through their titles. They show dynamically free painterly gesture and intense colouration. The bold brush strokes, colour and formlessness can quite readily be seen against the backdrop of current international trends of Neoexpressionist painting. However, Walkensteiner‘s sensuous, formless painting is developed strictly from his own work and cannot be seen, as with the Neue Wilde, as a reaction to the conceptual, minimalist intellectualisation of art. Moreover – at this point – there is still a lack of narration and figuration. With Walkensteiner, what looks like spontaneity, is in fact always thought out, planned, tested and cultivated – yet it is wild and powerful, vital and impulsive. Even what seems to have been casually tossed down there, has grown organically and in this respect is related to landscape. In Walkensteiner‘s work there is no „great abstract“, no absolute non-representationality, no purely formal conception – there always remains a conceptual connection with figurativeness. The abstract picture concepts and landscapes of the 1980s are superseded by an intensive orientation towards the figurative. His work is determined by man and his existence. In the 1970s, the artist was already dealing with this theme. Mid-decade, he created his first anonymous, abstract figurines, generated from vegetal landscape structures and sometimes connotated with archaic mythical symbols2 such as a recurring (bull‘s) horn. They are considered not only thematic, but also formal predecessors of later human images, referring particularly to the clarification of the figure-ground scheme. At the end of the 1970s/beginning of the 1980s, Walkensteiner worked on portraits presaging his tendency towards the dissolution of corporal integrity. This series of self-portraits analytically questions his own person. That is to say, the focus, which thus far – in a mythical sense – generally pointed towards landscape, nature and the basic conditions of life, is now directed at man himself and more precisely, at his own person, as exemplary for the Great Whole. Negotiation with the self, the approach to one‘s own physical nature and psyche, leads to images in which exterior aspects are linked with the inner world and with non-visible phenomena to form a kind of „virtual anatomy“3, for which the artist establishes a pictorial equivalent which manifests a correspondingly high degree of abstraction and grotesque distortion. Symbolic coloration and expressive gesture are the vehicles, deformation and dissolution of form the result. The primacy of realism, which is classically required of this genre, is – in keeping with Expressionist tradition – abandoned in favour of an expressive psychologising representation in which the subjective experience of being guides the artistic act and determines the end result. Walkensteiner‘s portraits are not, then, traditional likenesses, but rather expressions of feelings and thoughts in the context of visual perception. In the 1990s, the human being became the main subject in painting, together with the animal, the monkey as an ironic example of comparison and primarily the horse (which has figured constantly in his œuvre since his early works) with its distinct physiognomy and complex iconography, with all its historical, mythological and symbolic significance, embodying male and female, as a sign of both life and death, (sexual) urge, pride, power and wild strength. Both animal and human – whose encounters in Walkensteiner‘s pictures are not in a hierarchical relation, but rather in a common fate where one can stand for the other – are seen equally as thrown into the world, exposed, driven, tormented creatures, objects of a debate on existence, and as vehicles of violence, suffering and transience.4 His 1990s motifs are mythological figures, masculine types, socially marginalised figures such as beggars and clochards, the feminine mother figure, so-called couple poses where man and woman conjoin, opposite them stallion and mare as their animalic counterpart – a reference to the creatural in man, and ultimately once more his own self. The artist appears as an autonomous type, a painter in a self-reflective mise-en-scène. All pictorial content can be ascribed to private experiences, the descriptions to empathy and sublimation. Essentially, it is all about the basic things in life, being human, the (primitive, instinctive) nature of man, and about pure existence – unadorned and beyond civilisation and culture. Even when the painter takes his personal, most intimate aspects, he is speaking of general things. Precisely where life comes closest to him, in pleasure and suffering, when it gets under his skin, so to speak, he comes across the elementary which applies to everyone, and exposes it in a drastic way, turning the innermost out (at the same time artistically generating his method and his style). With the exception of the erotic scenes, the individual figures appear inactive, self-referential, emotional, agitated, in situations of existential significance formally reflected in the expressivity of the graphic design elements, in the faceted contours and animated use of line. The line not only draws the motif in its intensity, but is also a kind of seismograph of the artist‘s emotional state; the intensity of expression corresponds to the intensity of his emotion – and both to the urgency of the content. The facial expression, the agonised gaze make plain the figure‘s distress. Even the representation of the love-play excites a shudder, showing as it does not fulfilment of desire, but rather the horror of a dance of death . violence and transience. The bodies are broken up, disintegrating into bones and organs, into mobile features and individual colour fields, blotches and patches, and mutating into a form of suggestion, a state of being. The dissolving body forms a clear contrast to a demonstratively flat, homogenous, monochrome background, which becomes more differentiated only at the end of the decade. Space, time and place, not specifically defined, are thus universally valid. Occasionally a flat, oval form similar to the later oft-quoted egg form appears in the pictorial structure. Here it is either used as an internal platform for the figures, which appear as though in a spotlight, or else it is taken representationally, as a mirror provided to the figures as an instrument for self examination – just as the artist himself uses it. After this decade, the dominance of the human figure disappears. Walkensteiner‘s ideas expand into a wider frame of being, penetrate into the depths of matter and the expanse of space. Pictorially, from the individual parts of the disintegrating bodies there have developed formal tokens which now achieve validity as autonomous symbols. They are characterised by a powerfully associative organic form which, with its sinister holes and dark cavities, protuberances and convolutions, are reminiscent of bodily orifices, sexual organs or entrails. They do not leave the viewer unaffected, since they take him subconsciously back to the elementary level and touch on what is collectively suppressed, raising questions of becoming and passing, of life and death, directly addressing the physical in eroticism and transience, subtly violating boundaries of the taboo. It is not, however, provocation or elucidation that interests the artist; he conducts his intellectual debate as a subjective cognitive process carried on pictorially, undeterred and independent of reception. The work is a product of this cognitive process, a concentrate of ideas and experiences, acquired knowledge and insights, that exerts a suggestive effect on the viewer, but as a pictorial result achieves autonomy and acquires intrinsic value in the context of art. The preformed oval has now established itself in the picture as an egg, a symbol of fertility and life-force, reincarnation and resurrection. It is the nucleus of life, its simplest, most primal symbol; like infinity, it contains the entire cosmos.5 Walkensteiner develops logically from it his „manic masses“, the „comets“ and „meteorites“, etc., and there emerge „foreign bodies“, in the truest sense of the word – freely imagined, hitherto unknown forms of dead matter and parallel animated worlds – for example the giraffe, and later other animals. The representations in Walkensteiner‘s paintings allude to isolated, corporeal, abstract formal constructs based on direct or remembered visual impressions. The models are not always natural; the artist often works from prototypes he has made himself, simple sculptures of wood or wire, adhesive tape and synthetic materials, but especially clay. He forms this damp mass into small objects from his imagination. modelling them sensuously in his hands – amorphous objects with organic curves, permeated with holes and cavities, deftly palpated by the artist‘s fingers. The miniature models are put in place, illuminated or shaded, sometimes figuratively expanded, and in this way staged, mimetically transferred into a picture. In a rational, meticulous, painterly act of technical refinement which – in his fascinating inimitable style and well-considered choice of colour – lends the works on the canvas a sound superficial structure and a rich fullness, they are painted almost like portraits, executed without expression of emotion, which was already released in the process of forming the clay model, the authentic blueprint, so to speak. The specific operation of a multiple transformation process, from the idea to the concrete object, and then to the two-dimensional illusion, produces the result in which the motif appears as a three-dimensional body. Like the Demiurge, the Creator in Plato‘s Timaeus, the artist creates tangible things (and the cosmos) from primordial matter, according to his own idea. The shaped matter becomes reality. The pictorial space becomes, as always, an undefined depth, now interpretable as an infinite cosmic expanse, intuited as the „manic masses“ are formed and the „comets“ and „meteorites“ follow their course. When Wolfgang Walkensteiner cuts his objects out of the canvas to use them as mobile, transitory elements, substitutes them, in a first step, like tarsia-work with other „foreign bodies“6, integrates them in collages on several levels, or – in a further step – installs them as concrete objects directly in the exhibition room, then this is merely a logical artistic consequence in which the artist meaningfully develops his method and at the same time gains a further piece of reality, lends concrete reality and a new symbolic value to the illusionistic form and directly confronts the viewer (as the person concerned). In his pictures, various levels of different degrees of reality are dovetailed: the illusion of the object as painting and as cut-out, with the painted background depth, possibly structured in different foils which may be constructed like patchwork or like stage scenery. At any rate, the peculiar arrangement gives the impression of a dynamic stage-set in which the pictorial objects seem to glide weightlessly through the space like set pieces, not unimpressed by contemporary, mediatised pictorial worlds like electronically generated animated films. Today, Walkensteiner‘s obsessive „orgies of flesh“ seem outmoded. The emotional, existential scream ends in a concentrated philosophical questioning of being. The struggle for fulfilment and meaning gives way to a pragmatic search for truth and reality. The driving force of Eros has been replaced by an inquiring intellect that is not content with the things of life alone, but finds its answers in the realms beyond restricted human existence. The artist looks beyond the body-related problems the life entails. The path he takes goes from the sensuous to the intellectual, from the flesh to the symbol, from entities to being. Death and transience are not questions but facts which face all of us. Splendid fleshless skulls and rose-petals replace grisly bundles of bones and organs – showing the dignity of death instead of corruption and decay. If the artist has recently attempted to move from the detail to the whole, from the human being to experiencing something about his existence in this world in order to comprehend the meaning of existence, now it is the larger things and contexts that have significance for Walkensteiner – the cosmos, the universe and all its matter – being as a whole. It is the metaphysical search for connections, for principles and systems, for universally valid structures, that the artist lays forth on a small scale, in the microcosm, parallel to the large-scale, the macrocosm. Wolfgang Walkensteiner is a berserk intellectual, a world explorer and a powerful painter, who uses his whole, apparently inexhaustible potential in order to comprehend life and being in all facets and dimensions, relentlessly to plumb the depths of the self, to grasp it, to understand it and with every fibre to divine it, to savour it to the full, but also to experience it in suffering – deeply and completely. Painting is his vehicle and his broad path, his art an authentic testimony.