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LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz
Information Sheet
SIEGFRIED ANZINGER
DVR-Nummer 0002852
26 November 2010 to 13 March 2011
LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz, A-4021 Linz, Ernst-Koref-Promenade 1
Tel: +43 (0)732.7070-3600 Fax: +43 (0)732.7070-3604 www.lentos.at
Contents
Exhibition Facts
3
Press Text
4
Catalogue Text „Saints, Cowboys, and Indians“ by Elisabeth Nowak-Thaller
5
Biography Siegfried Anzinger
20
Press Images and Credits
21
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Exhibition Facts
Exhibition Title: SIEGFRIED ANZINGER
Exhibition Duration
26 November 2010 to 13 March 2011
Opening:
Thursday, 25 November 2010, 7 pm
Press Conference
Wednesday, 24 November 2010, 10 am
Exhibition Venue
LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz
Exhibits
57 paintings, 34 graphics and 21 sculpture (argil and bronze)
Exhibition/Catalogue Siegfried Anzinger and Elisabeth Nowak-Thaller
Catalogue
„Siegfried Anzinger“, published by Snoeck Verlag, Cologne with
essays by Elisabeth Nowak-Thaller and Guido Reuter as well as a
foreword by Stella Rollig.
german/english, 194 pages, price € 26,–, ISBN 978-3-940953-63-6
Contact
Ernst-Koref-Promenade 1, 4020 Linz, Tel. +43(0)732/7070-3600
[email protected], www.lentos.at
Opening Hours
daily 10 am–6 pm; Thur 10 am–9 pm (from February 2011 closed on
Mondays)
Admission
€ 6.50, Concessions € 4.50
Press Contact
Nina Kirsch, Tel. +43(0)732/7070-3603, [email protected]
Available at the Press Conference:
Stella Rollig, Director LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz
Dr. Elisabeth Nowak-Thaller, Head of the Collection
Siegfried Anzinger, Artist
Director Kurt Drimmel, Raiffeisen Landesbank Oberösterreich
The exhibition is supported by Raiffeisen Landesbank Oberösterreich.
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Press Text
With his new pictures Siegfried Anzinger has opened up a fresh, exciting chapter in his
artistic
career. The Cologne-based Upper Austrian is considered one of the most internationally
renowned Austrian painters and graphic artists. He has long been closely associated with
LENTOS and its predecessor institution the Neue Galerie.
The show offers an extensive insight into his versatile oeuvre. The exhibition centers around
the
most recent paintings, drawings and sculptures, which are confronted with early main works
selected as examples. Large format canvases are presented from his early work, as well as
the Paradise Pictures, created 2009/2010 and shown for the first time in Austria, series with
self-portraits, saints, cowboys & Indians.
Siegfried Anzinger, always sure to surprise, reinvents his art. He seeks confrontation, probes
what painting and drawing are capable of and will offer in the future. The tragicomic, the
grotesque, erotic satire are found in Anzinger’s most recent oeuvre.
The artist works with a high degree of autonomy, defying all fashions and trends of the time.
He
dares to take risks, masters the classical, paints, draws, models vigorously and at high
speed.
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Elisabeth Nowak-Thaller „Saints, Cowboys, and Indians“
Catalogue Text
Is Siegfried Anzinger a man’s painter?
The collectors of his works are predominantly male at any rate. Moreover, in publications on
the artist, authors—none of them female, it must be said—have come together in a kind of
male tête-àtête, which indeed reads like a veritable who’s who of German-speaking (male)
art writers and critics: Dieter Koepplin, Peter Baum, Wilfried Skreiner, Max Hollein, Siegfried
Gohr, Friedhelm Mennekes, Günter Rombold, Wolfgang Drechsler, Thomas Kellein, Peter
Weiermair, Lóránd Hegy. By contrast, Anzinger’s presence in the international art market is
organised by women. Since the very beginning, the artist’s career has been accompanied by
a phalanx of idealistic, female gallerists. Why are predominantly male art historians
preoccupied with Anzinger’s figural motifs, and why do men collect the drawings, paintings,
and sculptures by this painter from Upper Austria, now living in Cologne? Is it the presence
of violent, often grotesque, impudent sexual components in his oeuvre, or an age related
eroticism that personally affects and fascinates men? Is it the irritating aspect of male
humour running through the works as a constant that stands out? Or the religious
iconography of many of the works, with a male dominated Roman Catholic dogma resonating
there? The obscene joke and pornographic caricature have been a male preserve for
centuries. Informel, Tachism, and Abstract Expressionism, with their “large gestures”, are
also regarded as typically male styles of painting. “Man” (Anzinger included) makes art in
order to provide himself with a valve to vent his pent-up energies. At times, a passionate,
self-consuming working method provides a deep insight into the soul. With no small
amazement, we acknowledge the extent to which Anzinger increasingly opens himself up,
lays himself bare, reveals that tragicomic dimension, and thereby reinvents
his art again and again.
In his most recent works, the artist presents himself alternately as a cheerful, moody, fresh,
and richly faceted chap, all of which is laced with a powerful dose of irony and sarcasm, and
armed with an art-historical knowledge. The new motifs, with their parodic tenor, have
seemingly undergone a distinct uglification, that is to say, they have been exposed to
derision, and are becoming increasingly purposeful, autobiographical, “sharp”. Anzinger is
digging deeper to reach a substrate of fateful occurrences and expose his most intimate
inner life for us to see. At the same time, the aspect of a playful freedom when painting and
drawing is granted greater weight, for his credo is simply that one “can only arrive at truth via
genuinely free play and by making something well”.1
In 2009, Anzinger made one of many paintings with an autobiographical background: with a
bulbous nose, the ample paunch of the well-off, and a protruding lower lip, the artist is
brooding in his Cologne studio. Anzinger, looking out of his apartment window with a bored
expression upon St Kunibert’s, is sulking. The self-portrait, laconically entitled Kunibert, is
held in grey tones and accentuated by a heavy outline. One year prior to painting this work,
the artist produced two stained glass windows featuring daring biblical motifs for the church
in Weyer, in Upper Austria. Since then, the black outline, which refers back to the lead used
in Gothic stained glass, has become in - creasingly prominent in his work. The lines surround
the motif; they place accents, become equally important, only in the same instant to dissolve
again into the painting, or indeed to subvert it.
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The moody self-portraits seem to confirm Anzinger’s reputation as an introverted and
sensitive artist. Which female author would relish a brisk and forthright approach to such a
notoriously reserved artistic genius—penetrating and illuminating his most intimate world,
and thus mercilessly exposing it? A large section of Anzinger’s work created during the past
decades is dominated by depictions of women. As they cavort across his paintings, which
are flooded with light in an intoxicating, delicate symphony of colour, we behold a
preponderance of mothers, madonnas, latterly squaws, and, from time to time, whores.
Women in isolation, obscure and remote, angels of innocence, naked, with their legs spread
wide, women presenting themselves to be taken from behind, dressed in shorts, winged,
riding on horses or men, and kneeling or fallen women in impossible poses; endearing, lovely
women, attending devotedly to children, giving birth to little squirts, loving them, embracing
them, consoling them, lifting them up, breast-feeding them, and changing their nappies;
mothers and madonnas, observing their children at play or whilst sleeping, proudly proffering
their offspring. The theme of motherhood has taken up an immensely important position in
the artist’s creative world over the last decade. Anzinger, the proud father of a little boy,
observes and admires the mother and child, whom he paints, draws, and models in clay. He
is positively inspired by this wellestablished, venerable, art historical genre. He was
impressed at an early age by Titian and Bellini’s beautiful madonnas and Daumier’s ugly
mothers. In 1985, he had already painted a gigantic diptych, Virgin of Mercy, depicting the
Virgin taking people and children under her wing.
Anzinger’s amply flexible madonnas are “fully fledged women”: sensual, large breasted
matrons, and ever ready, willing lovers. They show little modesty, invariably presenting
themselves in a blatant manner. They are large, strong, “fine figures of women”, amazons no
less—women with beards, wild warriors. Ultimately, Anzinger’s women are genuine wonders
of transformation. They are madonnas, saints, whores, angels, squaws, monsters, and
mothers—infinitely ugly and beautiful in the same breath, mysteriously enraptured, and
brimful with earthly desire. Oskar Kokoschka, whose late work is comparable with Anzinger’s
paintings, would exclaim ecstatically when beholding these women: “Anima, my sweet
Anima!”
Like witches, Anzinger’s women crop up in trees, lodging themselves there like classical or
mythical hybrid creatures. Giovanni Segantini’s The Evil Mothers from the Belvedere in
Vienna, painted in 1894 and forming the final work in a series of four pictures, is the earliest
painting to permit comparisons of motif with Anzinger’s important series Frau in den Bäumen.
As early as 1982, we encounter a female nude in Anzinger’s oeuvre that, viewed from
beneath and severely attenuated, appears to be “headless” in the bushes, that is to say, in
an apple tree. The woman is hovering in a sea of fruit, with the sky opening above her. The
Fall from paradise has long since taken place, the ecstasy has waned. The preferred,
characteristically violent, wild brushstrokes of his earlier work underline the baroque
expressiveness of the drama. Here are sensuality and passion, as far as the eye can see.
But what of redemption? Can it be found?
In contrast to Segantini’s The Evil Mothers, who, with eyes closed, are cradled by the wind
like passive spectres, Anzinger’s three Astgabelmädchen from 2007 are energetically and
boldly performing gymnastics in the branches, exploring the air like curious, tiny apes driven
by instinct. “The female soul, sweet Anima, Anima”, exclaim the parrots in Kokoschka’s
grotesque Sphinx und Strohmann. Anzinger’s women are frequently bestial. As in C. G.
Jung’s writings, they appear in dreams, functioning as communicators between the
subconscious and the ego. “Anima” appears as the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, as a
worldly whore, a multifaceted, dangerous female. Anzinger’s nude appears to be sleeping, as
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does Segantini’s Evil Mother. And yet care is called for: as the title of Goya’s most famous
etching tells us—the frontispiece of the series Los Caprichos—”The Sleep of Reason
Produces Monsters”. Monsters were already playing havoc early on in Anzinger’s fantastical,
pictorial cosmos.
The playful, erotic element has assumed enormous importance, particularly in the most
recent works, which depict people as unredeemed beings in all their human frailty and lost
passions. Many of the main figures in Anzinger’s pictorial world are disfigured, in the manner
of a caricature, or heightened along mythological lines. Cranky types and dubious
characters, saints, and even yours truly, the artist himself, are all unerringly exposed in their
self-assured, virile genius. Recently, Anzinger’s “comic” gift has culminated in cynically
pointed statements, reminiscent of the best caricaturists and painters of demons from the
eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries: Francisco de Goya, Johann Heinrich Füssli,
James Gillray, William Hogarth, George Cruikshank, and James Ensor, not to mention the
masters of erotic caricature, such as Thomas Rowlandson, Félicien Rops, or Aubrey
Beardsley. The obscene, pornographic satire and depictions of suggestive male humour
enjoyed a particularly wide distribution in Anglo-Saxon countries. English caricaturists who
vilified society, particularly women, in a rich variety of ways were successful and esteemed in
equal measure, as well as spared censorship. In 1905, Sigmund Freud wrote in his essay on
“Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten” that jokes, that is to say dirty jokes, are
often used as a medium to regain a lost, repressed sexuality. In 1998, Anzinger depicted
Freud in a painting. The famous psychiatrist, wearing a large pair of spectacles, is floating
awkwardly above a lion. What is Freud on the look out for? Is he yearning for the power and
might of the lion?
Using the device of ironic defamiliarisation, situations are portrayed in which the depicted
individual presents him- or herself in a particularly inappropriate way, in order to make the
gap between appearance and reality more evident. In this way, the artist has recently
succeeded in creating highly incisive, humorous, immediate paintings, full of parabolic
character. Anzinger’s timeless pictorial narratives are always charged with motion, but never
lapse into illustration. They often seem as though they have arisen from some kind of
personal mental trauma: the self-glorifying prestige of the “heroic” man becomes a metaphor
for failure. Thus, the dreamt up, grotesque episodes act as a valve, and, at the same time, a
defensive screen against omnipresent eroticism and humourless pornography. The artist
paints himself in the middle of a society infiltrated by sex, youth mania, and abuse. He
ponders the basic needs and problems of humankind, such as sexuality, partnership, ageing,
social pressures, birth, childhood, illness, and death—and in so doing poses a number of
questions. Anzinger, the “Wild Little Prince” as Dieter Ronte once called him, is an artist who
paints from the heart. He “begets children on drugs”, he “formulates our chaos”.2
In the early work of the “storm and stress period”—the tumultuous “new wild” period—the
artist from Upper Austria was preoccupied with heroes with an expressive, gestural style.
The theme of the tragic, despairing figure becomes a mania: Der Geschlitzte, Der
Leopardenmann, Der Mohr, The Native, Blue Boy, Holländischer Reiter, Terrae Motus, Das
Weite Land, or the Zwei Krieger. The expressive warrior seems to be exposed to the
almighty power of nature. As a solitary figure, the naked hero is shunted closer to the edge,
overwhelmed by dynamic circles and spheres, from an unpredictable, hostile universe. He is
resplendent in sky blue and the red glow of dusk, exposed
to relentless assaults, and wave after stormy wave of colour. In the Kopfjäger, a male,
turquoise
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monster is standing in front of a fait accompli—a white skull immersed in blood-red hues. A
sea of trophies surrounds the victorious hero like a halo. This painting was originally
exhibited in June 1982 at the Klapperhof in Cologne, in the legendary exhibition Die Neue
Kunstlergruppe. Die Wilde Malerei in which Hubert Schmalix also participated. It was
exhibited in the same year at documenta 7 in Kassel.
In an interview with Wilfried Dickhoff, when Anzinger was asked about the expressivity of his
paintings made around 1982, he commented: “The paintings from this period give the
impression of being more expressive than they actually are. The whole thing for me was
more the kind of expression you get with an ironic smile, that is to say, an acted expressivity,
whereby the playful element was less to do with a preoccupation with painting. (...) My
paintings are interpreted, for example, as being more tragic than I intended them to be. I was
praised, above all, for representing existential things, for example, man within his secure
environment and his unredeemed state. It was simply accepted and agreed that my actual
theme lay in this area. The reception of my work in this way was pretty massive and I was
scarcely able to withdraw from it or, to put it another way, I couldn’t react to it. Although I
don’t want to suggest I suffered from it. I actually quite liked this misunderstanding. It
prompted me to act in an ironic way. (...) This reaction to the way my work was received was
a way of driving something out of myself by pushing it to the extreme, in the hope of being
able to get something interesting, painterly, out of it.” 3
Endowed with that typically depressive Austrian character, the artist is connected more
faithfully than ever to that ironic, smiling expression and “the extreme”. Does Anzinger paint
primarily as an affront? At first glance, his Wild West series from 2010 would seem to
provoke laughter in us. Anzinger’s idea of Native Americans, Westerns, and paradise
nurtures highly abstruse blooms. The joke inherent in these works appeals primarily to
women because the man—mostly it is the artist himself—becomes an object of scorn,
aggression, and sexual exposure. A gender-related suffering is, according to the results of
the artist’s analytical self-reflection, ubiquitous. Anzinger’s Wild West cycle also contains
pedagogical approaches and premises. Men must ultimately learn to accept their age related
weaknesses and shortcomings, discover how to change their spots, as it were, and renounce
male narcissism and fantasies of omnipotence. Anzinger—a man’s painter! And yet the artist
promptly contradicts: “Women as well as men impelled me to show myself, that is to say, to
write about myself (...) I always felt that women understood me better than men.”4 The hotly
debated topic of distinct male and female aesthetics does indeed exist! However, Anzinger
repeatedly subverts the barriers between the genders; he doesn’t heed boundaries of any
description, indeed, he tramples them underfoot, as every good artist does, with the result
that he is able to make fresh, fragile, daring art.
An inebriated Adam seduces his libidinous Eve: each of Anzinger’s characters seems to be
ecstatic, injured, sad, sexually out of joint. Urban man, in his daily struggle for survival, is
weak and sensitive. Gods, saints, idols or heroes, man and woman, the “wild ones” too:
cowboys and Indians, all of them are imbued with earthly faults, foibles, imperfections—
above all, they are sexually vulnerable.
In the highly reduced, seminal work from 2007 entitled Melancholie, Melancholy personified
is lurking in the lower third of the painting. A child who is turning way from her in the
foreground, a sleeping pair of lovers behind bars, a small demon—all are suffering from
melancholy and sadness. Here, Anzinger is operating in a playfully associative manner; a
postmodern recourse to the history of painting—Dürer and Cranach’s Melancholie—is
audacious, but it never descends into eclecticism. The artist studies different styles of
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painting, reflects art history, and humorously references the old masters. In contrast to other
painters of the first generation of “Die Jungen Wilden”, Anzinger is mostly devoid of the
destructive immediacy with which young artists manifest their personal Lebensgefühl. In spite
of an almost unbeatable, characteristic style comprising vehement brush strokes, Anzinger’s
oeuvre often seems introverted, lyrical, indeed quiet. It is the quiet which comes “before” or
“after” the storm, the moment of epiphany, and retreat into oneself that is articulated here.
The intimate, private world is turned inside out, in a time-honoured, Austrian, KokoschkaSchiele-Gerstl fashion. Many figures are depicted with their eyes closed, in a bowed posture.
They’re squatting, waddling, crawling on all fours through the cosmos—quietly daydreaming.
Sigmund Freud, the Madonna, God the Father, as well as yours truly, the artist himself,
congregate to form a kneeling universe. The bowed, introspective, solitary creative spirit
becomes a recurrent leitmotif, and encounters, in paradise or on earth, all manner of
creatures great and small: elephants, camels, monkeys, turtles, lions, hares, crocodiles,
ducks, dogs, and frogs—Anzinger’s bestial cosmos is positively crawling with images of
animals and horses.
The diptych entitled Ein zebrochener Tag II, shown at the Venice Biennale in 1998, is
numbered among the most grandiose masterpieces of the twentieth century. A powerful
white stallion poses in an indefinable space separated by a diagonal line, whereby a hand
holding a bottle is confusingly jutting into the picture from the right-hand edge. The front flank
of the horse is blood red, injured. However, in the narrow section of the diptych there is
movement; the horse is galloping, like Pegasus, towards the sky. The bottle now appears to
be hovering above the baroque horse’s croup. Horse and bottle intersect each other in a
series of painted, zonal surfaces, with the finest tonal nuances in between. It is a unified
whole, possessing the greatest painterly refinement and skill, ingeniously squeezed out
under pressure during a single night. It is a dangerously accurate and beautiful work—poetic
melancholy, powerful and, at the same time, wild. “That’s why I paint and draw, so that I can
actually see these things, so that I can actually arrive at them. That is the sole motivation for
painting and drawing.”5
The things that he arrives at here are the instinctual drives, the secret processes, the
oftentimes tragic force and power of nature, the dominion over which has long since slipped
from man’s grasp. Body parts or objects float effortlessly in space, they move freely in one
direction or another. In this place, the fusion of man and beast, as it is repeatedly presented
in Anzinger’s works, is possible at any time, as though everything is subject to a kind of
shared destiny.
Tempelpferd from 1987, Pferd im Steinbruch from 1988, the Pferde mit Karren series from
1996, and Blonder Schweif, Pferdearsch, or TonpferdchenI, all of which date from 1997, refer
to the impressive clay horses of the Chinese ruling dynasties. The Church Fathers, whom
Anzinger parodies in his most recent works, attribute arrogance and licentiousness to the
horse, which at the same time symbolises victory. St Martin, St George, St Hubert, or
Anzinger’s Barmherziger Samariter all ride upon these noble, excessively nervous, shy, and
occasionally also aggressive creatures. Anzinger’s horses are the epitome of power and
vitality. They are as dependable as they are capricious, able to draw carriages, carts, or
hearses. They are the mounts of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or Christus Triumphans,
presenting himself on a white horse.
Many of Anzinger’s paintings, particularly the horse and cart pictures, evoke memories of my
youth, and holidays in the country, which I spent as a child on a farm in the Mühlviertel. The
daily routine was onerous: feed the animals in the stables, muck out, take care of the
animals, ride “bareback”. Nowadays, I have a horse of my own standing in its stable, for, as
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is universally known, those desires, intensely painted or thought, eventually become reality.
Anzinger’s cart paintings also remind me of walks in the Bohemian Forest as well as hard,
physical work during the harvest period, accompanied by the scent of fresh hay and meadow
flowers, or the acrid stench of ammonia in the stables. Paintings of portly, rotund cows,
leaping calves, mad, barking dogs, and horses grazing on sumptuous flower-strewn
meadows—conjure up happy childhood memories, indelibly stamped on my mind.
Can it possibly be that my childhood memories and those of Siegfried Anzinger coincide? We
both grew up in the country and are connected to our native Upper Austria. Anzinger first
came across museum-based art of any substance in Linz in 1968. An exhibition by Alfred
Kubin, which the young man visited, aroused his interest in art at the time. The
commencement of our respective courses of study initiated a new period in our lives:
Anzinger moved from the country to Vienna, I started my degree in Salzburg, reading Art
History. We took our leave of Upper Austria, and bade farewell to all the horse-drawn
carriages that occasionally got stuck in the mud during the 1960s, farewell to the provinces,
to down-to-earth attitudes, and to an untroubled period in our lives.
Our paths didn’t cross again until 1986 in Linz. On February 6, 1986, Peter Baum brought the
first museum-based exhibition of the work of the thirty-three year old Anzinger from Basel to
the Neue Galerie, an exhibition that had originally been organised by the director of the
Graphic Section of the Basel Art Museum, Dieter Koepplin. A photograph by Peter Baum
shows the shy artist smiling for the museum director’s camera. Fresh out of college with my
doctorate in Art History, I was responsible for the tours of the 200 exhibits. On display were
erotic, wild drawings from 1977 to 1985, early works full of plasticity and spatial
dimensionality. Writing in the Linzer Volksblatt, the art critic Roswitha Reichart praised the
“existential dimension” of the “most important representative of the new painting in Austria”.
And in the Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, Peter Möseneder called Anzinger a “vital, wild
figurehead”, stating moreover that he had returned as an artistic triumpher to his homeland. “
(…) He is more flexible than a large section of the “New Wild Ones”. (…) The constant
search for new possibilities in the application of pictorial media, the continual variation in
painting style of an easy pittura alla prima, all the way to impasto games of colour within
richly nuanced, layered texture and mixed tones, produce repeatedly new and arresting
compositional moments (…).”6
Twenty-four years since his important solo exhibition in the Neue Galerie, and after a sixyear absence from any art museum in his native Austria, Anzinger has now bestowed the
honour upon the LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz. He guarantees new, fascinating insights, and
would like, as he says, “to show less of everything I have done, and much more of what
actually moves and catalyses me at the moment, and where this journey might be heading
…”7
Tumbled Saints – Monstrous Gods
For Siegfried Anzinger, painting is thinking; it is also the epitome of memory. Some paintings
draw upon impressions from childhood, “perhaps even very early ones, but also from images
that were seen much later, painted, dreamed images that can crop up again and again,
rather like chains of thought, with a certain stubborn regularity”.8 Others tell of current
experiences: of desires, dreams, erotic jokes, or lust. In his most recent self-portraits,
Anzinger presents himself increasingly as a visionary and introspective thinker. The artist,
who works serially and in phases, constantly redeveloping motifs from a perpetual
compulsion and desire to make it better, likes to push “a new motif I have in my head to the
forefront of my mind so that I can anticipate it all the more eagerly”. The paintings that
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“happen” to the artist “and which hold him up for a long time”, often arise in parallel. In this
way, Anzinger works on three to four paintings simultaneously, in order “not to repeat the
same mistakes I made in the first ones”. He “commits himself to motifs and always wanted to
tread familiar ground from the outset”;9 and in so doing, he initially helps us as viewers find a
way into his work, cradling us as it were in a kind of security, only to unsettle us the next
breath by stating that he has nothing to say. Instead, he paints in order “to open something
up”. The recognition value serves then to guide one’s attention to the heart of the matter. But
what is the heart of the matter? Is it the influence of other paintings? Resistance to routine, to
perfection? The struggle against aging? The spontaneous process of painting and drawing
per se? Painting against the ineluctable enemy, time? As is the case with many good
painters, the choice of motif in Anzinger’s work is concentrated upon a few classical main
themes from the history of art: mother and child, Adam and Eve, the Madonna, landscapes,
animals, self-portraits, the cycle of creation, and, last but by no means least, the Bible, the
Lives of the Fathers, the church, early church fathers, such as Hieronymus und Antonius.
Whereas St Jerome is working on his vulgate, morosely introspective and sitting in the lotus
position in front of a rock alongside the erect cross with a scarlet cardinal’s hat (cardinals
didn’t exist during St Jerome’s lifetime!), the St Anthony the Great-acetic and anchorite, socalled Father of the monks—has unfortunately just succumbed to temptation. The Devil
appears in female form and torments St Anthony with more than mere excruciating visions.
No more frugality and a life devoted to God. Anthony is looking confusedly upwards at sin
personified in the naked body of a woman. Hieronymus Bosch, Matthias Grünewald, Max
Ernst, Salvador Dali, and Siegfried Anzinger base their depictions of St Anthony’s temptation
on the Vita Antonni in extremely free and distinctive ways, but at all times deploying
narrative, fantastical images.
In Bosch’s The Temptation of St Anthony (Madrid), Anthony is surrounded by all manner of
fantastical beasts. A pig and a “mini dragon” beguile the saint whilst a semi-submerged
crablike creature with a human face is waving towards the bank from an opaque stretch of
river. Anzinger’s Antonius by contrast, succumbing to pleasures of the flesh, is propping
himself up on a giant tortoise during intercourse, whereby the giant tortoise is discreetly
averting its eyes from the proceedings, or is perhaps uninterested. (In old art-historical
representations, the tortoise’s carapace serves as a support or a crutch for the arching
heavens). At any rate, this creature—renowned for its longevity, itself a metaphor for
immovable order on account of its invulnerability and further symbolising protection from
external attack—has turned away with its nose in the air from the “fallen saint”.
In a painting entitled Hieronymo (illustr. p. 99) made at the start of 2010, Anzinger by contrast
depicts the venerable church father lounging lazily in front of the pearly gates exhausted from
his translation of the Vulgate, and, accompanied by a pair of lions and Jesus on the cross; he
is taking a nap in a magnificent “Danube School landscape”. The cardinal is inspired and
ensnared by a sinister angel that is menacingly casting a net over him. Into whose clutches
has St Jerome fallen? The black line outlines the nebulous, ever-changing luminous sections
of colour-yet another painting that is, in the best sense, well executed, masterful, but also
comical, divorced from reality, otherworldly, enraptured.
The recent painting of a truly singular, corrupt paradise laconically entitled Paradies (illustr. p.
109) resembles a paraphrase of Titian’s or Peter Paul Rubens’ Adam and Eve in the Prado.
Greedily and with her tongue protruding, the lascivious Eve reaches out towards the apple of
the forbidden tree. Rubens’s seductive lover, who hands her the fruit, is missing from
Anzinger’s painting, as are the parrot and the snake. However, Anzinger does adopt Adam’s
accentuated righteousness in the work of the two masters. Adam, who unequivocally bears
Seite 11
Anzinger’s facial characteristics, is hesitantly taking Eve’s arm. Where as Rubens depicts his
muscular Adam in a sitting position, Anzinger’s Adam—who, comparable to former’s
Drunken Silenus, is reeling drunk—is propping himself upon a giant tortoise. In representa
tions of Adam and Eve since Albrecht Dürer, animals have symbolised universal harmony
and balance of the four humours. Equilibrium in Paradise has been forfeited as a result of the
Fall. The ox (phlegmatic), the elk (melancholic), the hare (sanguine), and the mouse
(choleric) are repeatedly depicted with Adam and Eve, but are also supplemented by lions,
bears, sheep, chickens, dogs, and cats, that is to say, monkeys. A baboon with red
hindquarters—copulating with a grinning human visage in Anzinger’s painting—embodies the
inability to experience true pleasure. The vain monkey “apes” the man uninhibitedly during
the sexual act and pulls faces shamelessly from the painting at the viewer. An illustrated
Wiener Werkstätte broadsheet by Oskar Kokoschka from 1907 depicts an ape with similarly
human physiognomy. The artist himself, personified as a monkey, battered from the
confrontation with the woman, who is personified as a parrot. The monkey (man) has lost his
face and the bird (woman) some of her feathers.
Whereas apes, lions, and elephants are widely distributed in depictions of the Fall, the
presence of exotic beasts—crocodile and a tortoise—are unique in Anzinger’s version of
paradise. The wise old elephant is not a “phallic creature” merely on account of his trunk,
whereas the crocodile, a creation from the primordial chaos, was even venerated in Egypt as
the God Sobek and mummified after death. Nevertheless, in the case of the latter, we are still
dealing with a reptile with snapping jaws hungry for human flesh, that is to say, an image of
all hypocrites, misers, and lechers.
In the wake of Paradies, Anzinger reinterprets the Garden of Eden with a great deal of
humour and invents a new Garden of Earthly Delights—the artist is like the ape, always
ready. Lets paint about sex, baby! Viagra & Co. finally finds its way into the classical pictorial
lexicon. Whereas Picasso outed himself in a conversation with his friend Brassaï by stating
that “desire is still there! The same holds for making love: one doesn’t do it anymore, but the
desire remains!”10, Anzinger for his part comments on his “long-time firm favourite”—
eroticism—in his paintings as follows: “perhaps the motifs, which have logically arisen from
the fields of colour and initial lines, owe themselves to the youthful freshness of my artistic,
age related randiness. The fact that it is about sexual forms here simply cannot be
overlooked, but it’s about sex in the literal sense. It is about a sexual directness and not
about any kind of artistically sublimated eroticism (...). Sex and humour are mutually
exclusive. Sex is almost always serious, full of pathos, and dramatic. The more lustful one
presents a sex scene, the less sexy or horny (...) the pornographic element (...) has
something philosophical about it and is not necessarily the opposite of the artistic
component. There can also be a bit of a spark in the depiction, a means of exaggeration
with which one can get closer to reality than one can with the proper restraint”. 11
In 1981, Anzinger’s preoccupation by the ancient figure of Priapus, the epitome of desire,
engendered a series of works. Priapos (Greek Πρίαπoς, Latinised Priapus), progeny of
Dionysus and Aphrodite, appears as the God of Fertility. Priapus statues, equipped with a
powerful, erect phallus made mostly from solid wood and painted red, were considered lucky
talismans and supposed to guarantee abundant harvests, simultaneously doubling as
scarecrows in gardens or to frighten off would-be thieves. Anzinger’s Priapos, which arose
after a trip to Italy and the visit to Pompeii wall paintings in Vienna as the first painting of a
six-part cycle, is frightening by means of its immediacy. 12 In a side view, the powerful God of
Fertility with a larger than life phallus, poses in the lefthand foreground of the painting. With a
melancholy demeanour, he presents his erect member and assumes direct eye contact with
Seite 12
the viewer. As a pendant to him, likewise powerful, a voluminous nude viewed frontally
appears and a still life separates the two naked figures. A crouching ape with a skull’s face
lurks in the background of this erotic paradise. A change in technique coincides with this
series of paintings. Anzinger no longer paints with oils, using acrylic on nettle cloth instead.
The style of painting becomes more nebulous and virtuoso, figural expressivity giving way to
an erotic playfulness and ease, which is continued in his most recent creations. Even in
these paintings based on mythology, the playful approach is forced. Role-playing takes on
increasing significance here, indeed, it becomes ubiquitous. The artist constantly slips into
new roles. Did Anzinger consider himself to be Priapus in all his youthful virility? Did he
identify with the Greek God and did he resort to, as did Picasso, the means of camouflage in
the painting?
Cowboy or Indian? Never was the Wild West so erotic ...
Like Picasso in his later cloak-and-dagger works, Anzinger has been staging parodies of the
Wild West and the lives of saints recently. The artist approaches the work with an unbridled
dramaturgical delight in narration. Priapos, the epitome of restless, youthful desire has
become a kneeling factotum in the painting Die Kutsche (illustr. p. 104) from 2010, whose
genitals appear to be limp and shrivelled. He is devotedly following the chieftain who is
wearing an imposing feathered headdress. Are we dealing here with the alter ego of the
ageing chieftain, who can only observe the departure of wagon from a distance? The
yearning looks are directed towards the landscape, following the course of the wagon. At first
concealed, then as an image within an image—like a renaissance distorting mirror—the artist
himself features at the lower edge of the painting. The feather decoration redolent of the
alpine region accentuates the grotesquerie, which in turn proffers a secondary scene of
action in a tent, in which the shadows are up to no good. Which erotic components still obtain
in old age? Fantasy and voyeurism? Desire at any rate, if Picasso is to be believed. The
chieftain’s lover is departing in the wagon, leaving the country and the tribe forever.
The artist’s love life often becomes an operating table or a sacrificial stake. At an early stage
in Anzinger’s oeuvre, the idea of the memento mori takes hold. A great deal of attention is
paid to the topic of the transitory nature of youth, which can lead all the way to the loss of
virility. The artist sees himself in a humorous vein as an ageing chieftain (illustr. p. 102) who
allows himself to be pampered by young squaws once more. The erect phallus has given
way to the barrel of the gun, which is now threateningly held high as a substitute.
Alternatively, Anzinger appears as a rescuing cowboy who is creeping up on the manacled
woman. Role playing, as far as the eye can see! Who has tied up the squaw (illustr. p. 107)?
Could it possibly have been the cowboy, the artist himself, who is actually creeping away?
We even have St Sebastian (illustr. p 115) tied to the stake, perforated with the arrows of
desire and lust—temptations and serviced by a young squaw with flushed cheeks. The artist
as martyr! Anzinger adopts the pose of the “wild Red Indian” and then mutates and changes
his costume into the audacious cowboy. Cowboy or Indian? As you like it…
Is it an accident that Picasso, who, like Anzinger, was constantly aware of his unique position
in art in the twentieth century, likewise posed as both a cowboy and an Indian? Which role
best suited these two great masters? When visiting Picasso in La Californie in Cannes, David
Douglas Duncan photographed the artist wearing an Indian chieftain’s battle dress made
from eagle feathers. The American actor Garry Cooper presented Picasso with this trophy,
whereupon the artist started to pose immediately, evidently in his element in the costume. In
1960 shortly before his death, Garry Cooper visited his friend once more and brought the
Wild West costume as a present. Again, the artist dressed up with his legendary striped Tshirt, cigarette, revolver and cowboy hat.13 Anzinger, like Picasso before him, enjoyed
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alternating the mythical poles of artistic engagement during advanced age. They present
themselves as naked, wild Indians, who embody primal forces, exclusively following their
own rules, and presenting themselves as immoral, violent or suffering beings-capriciously
swapping these roles at will.
There are innumerable photographs of Picasso as an old man posing semi-naked in
swimming trunks or underpants. Pablo wore shorts as a matter of course in front of guests,
his naked upper body, as Brassaï observed, was “brown as a Sioux chieftain, with shaved
head, his face tanned by wind and weather”.14 In 1968, humorously dressed in underpants
and surrounded by waving palm trees, a young Sigmar Polke (1941–2010) posed in the
portfolio … Höhere Wesen befehlen/Polke als Palme. Twenty years later, Martin
Kippenberger (1953–1997) handed himself over to the “Neuen Wilden” with his “underpantportraits”, depicting himself, like Anzinger, as melancholy drunk, overweight, yet faceless. In
2010, Anzinger outs himself as an Indian chieftain with a naked upper body, beer belly, and
bulbous nose. In this way, the portrait of the artist in underpants, viz. loincloth, becomes a
statement.
In a highly engaging article on Picasso, the art historian Thomas Zaunschirm puts forward an
interesting theory: “Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Klee, Duchamp without shirt and socks?
Is it saying too much to state that whoever lacks vitality needs a theory?”15 Anzinger and
Picasso chiefly dispense with theory. The highest degree of openness, passion, feeling,
sensuality, virtuosity is called upon. Both of them are considered important innovators in
painting. They resist being co-opted by trends or fashion, they are outsiders to a certain
extent, proverbial grenzgänger, even crossers of borders, always pushing the envelope.
Sceptical until the last, be they in the bullring or tied to the stake, they exclaim “everything
appears to us as a ‘figure’”.16 The motif becomes a vehicle, but ultimately only the act of
painting counts. Anybody able to place figurative marks swiftly doesn’t need to study
aesthetics and theory. Orientated more towards experience and imagined things, Picasso
and Anzinger’s figures never ever pursue the intention or idea of a finished painting. The
primary interest lies in the stages of formation as a process itself. For both artists, the idea of
a painting is not a fixed a priori, but the work itself arises during the working process.17
“Whilst one is working on the piece, it changes to the same degree as one’s thoughts. When
it is finished, it continues changing, according to the state of mind of the person who happens
to be looking at it in that point of time”, observed Picasso.18 A painting is never finished—
Anzinger keeps working on it passionately, overpainting, altering, torturing himself. Picasso
suffered in a similar vein. For the Spaniard, finishing a work is tantamount to “giving it the
coup de grâce!”
As both an art historical sleuth and ‘tracker’ on horseback, I’ve been trying to hunt down the
Big Chief. Is the Upper Austrian parodying Picasso’s likeness in the painting Entenjagd
(illustr. p. 101) from 2010? Mimicking the strict, powerful chieftain with pursed lips and a
serious demeanour, Anzinger’s physiognomy bears a resemblance to the photos of the
Spaniard in Native American costume. “Completely external, simple occasions can be a real
bonus when squaring up to a topic, forcing the issue and getting it under way.” 19 Anzinger
describes the complex encounters with Picasso’s paintings as a rejuvenation process. Is it
conceivable that Anzinger came across a photo of Picasso in Indian costume in one of the
books on the master by one of his friends, Siegfried Gohr? If he did, then he certainly didn’t
register it consciously.
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“Painting is like a pack of wild dogs ...”20
Siegfried Anzinger considers his art to be an exercise in learning. He is not afraid of failure;
he
works step by step and is indefatigably inventive, to which an early drawing from 1985
bearing the autobiographical title Laokoon übt, clearly alludes. Thus for the perpetual seeker,
painting means “working on oneself”.21 In this way, “painting can formulate moments of a
inherently fractured beauty, in which everything one loves and hates—all things included and
excluded—responds to one beat, which I dictate. So failure is normal”.22
Time and time again, the artist finds himself exhausted after long, onerous phases of work.
He tries to gain a distance to examine and repeatedly re-examine what he is currently
creating, because he “invents every element in painting himself”.23
Four months before the start of the exhibition, Anzinger throws himself into his task, trying
out new canvases and selecting the individual works. Each new exhibition entails immense
pressure, but Anzinger needs exhibitions as targets after phases of rest, be they long or
short. He needs this encouragement, or more precisely, the galvanizing declaration of war
from the gallerists, collectors, and museum personnel in order to question his previous
creative output, which tends to occur in sporadic bouts of activity. After a particular period
has been completed, he changes his technique, devoting himself, like Picasso, to sculpture,
drawing, and painting, almost automatically resurrecting earlier pictorial motifs. For example,
the transition to painting with egg tempera in keeping with traditional recipes arose because
an allergy to oil and acrylic paint made their sustained use impossible. Since 1984, the net
result of this physical restriction has been series of clay sculptures, which he produced in
recurring short phases, of which some, for example the Prometheus series, the Berlinerin, or
the Buddhas were cast in bronze. Be it the Laocoon group, angels, madonnas, or Buddhas:
all of the sculptures can be read as profound treatments of painterly problems. Anzinger is
concerned here with the body and its volume as a cavity; the sculptures themselves enjoy a
reciprocal exchange with his paintings. In a similar way to his paintings, the sculptures
present themselves as sensual, complex, and dynamic, but above all playful and inwardly
torn entities. Balls or slabs of clay form the starting point for the act of modelling, that is to
say the raw manipulation with the hands. Anzinger is creating something here in the most
elemental sense imaginable. His choice of terracotta places him within a Mediterranean
tradition, the Madaonnas recalling classical statuary, whereas the Buddhas with their smooth
shiny bellies, wittily parody the classical, imperious poses and busts portraying Roman
emperors, replete with broken-off noses.
To this day, Anzinger remains a passionate seeker, with a self-consuming method of
working. He repeatedly investigates pathways and possibilities, takes a new run-up, corrects,
breaks off, reinvents. He paints, draws, and models at great speed and is thus able to bring
individual works to a critical point, indeed, occasionally to a state of collapse. Frequently
dissatisfied, he scraps what he has done, painting over works he has already finished. He
draws tirelessly, quickly, but not spontaneously, fails, begins again from scratch, and
produces sheet after sheet during numerous sleepless nights. Like finger exercises on the
piano, the brush or pencil glides across the paper. Theme and variation in major and minor,
comedy and tragedy—the graphic bandwidth is prodigious. He feels compelled to create
something new and constantly pose questions. For Anzinger, drawing can be equated with
ease and progress, and once more has become—for the time being at any rate—”the most
important thing ever”. Perhaps for this reason, the graphic gestus has found its way more
pronouncedly into his current paintings. The black outline becomes a musical leitmotif,
setting the signature for the new works. Be it chamber music, an etude, an operetta, or a full-
Seite 15
blown opera, Anzinger’s “finger exercises” are borne by beauty, bravura, passages of
dissonance, and surprises. It is quite understandable then that the artist can easily imagine a
life “with just a pencil and a piece of A4”.
Anzinger experiences painting on the other hand as something onerous and limiting; on the
subject of oil painting, he observed that this “dull jittery, sardine-smearing (…) was finally a
thing of the past for me”.24 In an interview with the magazine Flash Art, the artist speaks
about his need to move away from the baroque style towards a “personal mathematics”.25
However, as far as his current work is concerned, baroque iconography will definitely be
closing this gap. After the period spent painting with oils, Anzinger devoted himself to
painting with egg tempera in a range of aggressive white tones. “I would like the theme of
light to be at the heart of painting.”26 One might even say that Anzinger had invented
distemper, indeed that he developed this ancient, unconventional, impressive technique
himself. Distemper is a transparent, thin, light, but also a dull substance lending itself more
readily to improvisation. Anzinger’s distemper painting doesn’t need any preliminary sketches
and coheres with the motto: quick, quicker, quickest. The motif itself must keep moving, not
least because of the accelerated drying process.
“that now, reposing, you may be complete in men, angels and madonnas” (Rainer
Maria Rilke, Ich liebe dich, du sanftestes Gesetz, 1899)
In his continuous search for new departures in painting, Anzinger changes his vernacular in
each respective medium. Extreme discontinuities are perforce an essential feature of this
way of painting, which is constantly reinventing itself. “The nature of painting is not to hold
out one’s hand to time, but to create something free in an undisguised way, even if it goes
wrong, even if it is embarrassing and frowned upon.”27 At first, the changing forms of
expression are unsettling, but doubts about painting and drawing are Anzinger’s constant
companions in any case. They are the inner driving force behind an art that is simultaneously
poetic, fragile, grotesque, and by turns, hedonistically erotic. Anzinger’s Paradiese, Virgil’s
Arcadias, Dante’s Inferno, Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights all occupy similar territory
here. The master of the puzzling—who lets his paintings take shape out of the process of
painting itself, choosing not to conceive them as ideas—challenges the observer and lures
him into a trap through bizarre comparisons. Those who believe they have grasped the
painting’s meaning at first glance, soon discover that they are on the wrong track. Goblins,
fauns, the crocodile in the Garden of Eden or the frog on the table in the Last Supper all lurk
roguishly. The enjoyment of provocation and, more recently, the farcical caricatures that
remind one of comic strips, are in Anzinger’s blood. In fact, during a stay in Italy, did the artist
not take pleasure in “getting on the nerves of the locals from the village with these funny
erotic themes as they passed through my studio”? 28 One surmises that Anzinger was
responding to the parody of the Karl May film Der Schu des Manitu from 2001, considered to
be one of the most successful German films since the end of the Second World War. Yet the
artist claims not to have seen the film… As with Picasso, Anzinger’s penchant for the
tragicomic has increased in recent years. His “Drama der Menschheit” (Drama of Mankind) is
enriched with capriccios—whims and fanciful ideas. Theme and variation are displayed here
in shimmering diversity and overlaid with a new graphic and painterly gestural quality.
Personal memories and experiences, biblical motifs, sleuthed-out masterpieces, as well as
found objects give rise jotted notes, sketches, and numerous series of works using the
distemper technique in which transparent layers of colour penetrate without obliterating the
motif, which relies on a drawn outline.
Siegfried Anzinger is a sleuth and solver of mysteries. He enters “side streets and country
roads”29 and doesn’t shy away from experiment or risk of any kind. He wants to “put
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something unsafe on the stage”.30 He paints in dark rooms; he paints wearing pairs of dirty
spectacles or green-tinted sun glasses, or stands very close to the canvas-all of which is
aimed at gaining some distance. After wild and expressive beginnings, Anzinger started to
surprise the Austrian public from 1994 with calm, composed portraits: Bildness D. N., Großer
Papa or Christoph are all portraits that have little to do with traditional portrait painting. The
faces of the subjects in the portraits remain vacant, empty. Many of the people in the
portraits, some of whom are close to Anzinger, are only visible from behind, but the specific
aura, or the personal radiation from the person depicted cannot be overlooked. In 1995,
Anzinger amazed everyone with his sublimely beautiful and ugly madonnas that refer both to
the mother of Christ, as well as a multilayered image of women. Inasmuch as the madonnas
were prompted by problems deriving from modelling with clay, one year later, the carriage
paintings referred, among other things, to Joseph Roth’s novel Hiob. The carriages and
images of madonnas continued to develop, began to populate space, dissolved and became
one with their surroundings, the landscape, the air. Foreground and background are now
indistinguishable. For Anzinger at that time, form had its strongest effect immediately before
its dissolution. From 1998 to 2001, Anzinger created the lion, the hare, the duck, and the girl.
In the following years he resumed his work on madonnas, crucifixions, and Das letzte
Abendmahl; he concerns himself with the church fathers (loneliness and meditation) Daniel
in der Löwengrube (despair) with the Barmherziger Samariter (rescue) and culminates in the
frivolous Backside Angels and the Frauen in den Bäumen. Drawing and a general sense of
ease have returned to Anzinger’s existential painting. Nor are the angels the only ones to
appear playful, fresh, direct, coruscating with wit, ambiguous humour, and eroticism.
Anzinger himself becomes a tragic protagonist in his Wild West and Paradise cycles. The
new, often sexual motifs in a fresh corporality are guided by fine black lines, accompanied by
coloured accents—in the main a profusion of delicately differentiated blue and red tones. The
boundaries between painting and drawing have finally been broken down, dissolved; paint
and line possess the same value. “It is often the leftover lines or tantalising colours out of
which the forms derive, suggesting configurations from which the painting can develop.
Besides, I simply like to amuse myself when painting by doing something I like to look at”.31
Indeed, even Siegfried Anzinger’s church windows represent amusement on the highest
level. He designed two glass church windows in 2008 (illustr. p. 177) for the parish church of
his birth place Weyer an der Enns, which were produced in the glass workshops of the
Schlierbach Monastery in Upper Austria. As a designer of glass windows, Anzinger is in
excellent international company: Markus Lüpertz completed twelve figurative glass windows
for both transepts of the St Andreas Dominican church in Cologne by 2010. Gerhard Richter
designed a rose in the southern transept of Cologne Cathedral in 2007 as an abstract
coloured mosaic based on digital colour pixels.
The first impression you get upon entering the “Enn Valley Cathedral” is a subtle play of
colour, a luminous blue contrasted with red. The windows would definitely recall gothic glass
windows, even Chartres, were it not for Anzinger’s usual suspects: a dubious God the
Father, a fallen St Jerome with his lion, a vulnerable, naked Jesus, madonna and child
accompanied by a host of angels, not to mention Adolf Hitler, to whom Jesus is referring in a
conversation! Anzinger has designed both a “male” and “female” window. The lance-shaped
windows measure more than six metres and the preliminary sketches will be shown to scale
for the first time in LENTOS. In the lower section of the female window, Mary Mother of
Christ is holding the crucified Saviour as Baby Jesus in her arms in a new type of
composition. Death/Pietá and birth/veneration are interwoven here. Even the explosive topic
of child abuse is mentioned—a bold, painful motif that has preoccupied Anzinger in drawings,
watercolours, and paintings in several different ways. Anzinger’s stained glass windows rank
Seite 17
as autonomous artworks with an individual iconography of the highest quality. The coloured
sections are divided graphically, while the lead came holds the pieces in place, their fluid
forms recalling art nouveau windows and creating different surfaces of luminous colour
according to the angle of the penetrating light. When memory is superimposed on invention
and experience, selectivity disappears. The artist discovers phenomena hitherto submerged
and now floating on the surface; he holds a mirror up both to society and to himself, revealing
deceit, exposing untruths, and laying bare ugliness, self-righteousness, embarrassing
behaviour, human weakness, and personal vanity. An expert on iconographical tradition,
Anzinger varies new and old motifs and functions as a passionate networker among his own
fundamental design principles. He values the old and the new masters and is an avid student
of classical art. Which European artist since Michelangelo has dared the depiction of
creation? Which artist has approached the theme of banishment from Paradise in the same
spirit as Titian, Cranach, or Dürer?
One thing is certain, Siegfried Anzinger will always be full of surprises. Perpetually on the
edge, always searching for something new, ever crossing boundaries, constantly charting the
potentialities of painting and drawing, and anticipating what it might offer in the future. He is
always one step ahead, and, like Picasso during his late period, is fond of taking colossal
liberties. He paints like no other contemporary artist, working in a “timeless”, anachronistic
manner with a high degree of autonomy, in defiance of old modes and current trends. He
dares to do the impossible; he has mastered the Classical, he paints, draws, sculpts with a
high degree of risk and at an even higher tempo. From phase to phase when painting, he
battles to wrest the figure from the clutches of figuration, in order, latterly to reestablish it
more emphatically as grotesquerie, as social or erotic satire. “He prefers to concentrate upon
the ‘issue of contemporary burning’ as opposed to drawing upon the ‘burning contemporary
issue’”. Cézanne’s promise still holds for Siegfried Anzinger today: “I owe you the truth in
painting.”32
Whilst I have been struggling with these lines, Anzinger, full of doubt and scepticism, has
been wrestling in his Cologne studio with new paintings for Linz. Paintings which perhaps will
“disturb the heavens”, which will at any rate be shown at the LENTOS exhibition, and which,
hopefully, can be included in the catalogue at the last minute. Siegfried Anzinger has
reinvented himself and his art once more. At the age of just fifty-seven, he has produced a
fresh, light, impudent, and to boot, comical and erotic “early work” preceded by a worldlywise late work. But is anybody bothered that this is back to front?
____________________________________________________________
1 Wilfried Dickhoff, “Siegfried Anzinger im Gespräch mit Wilfried Dickhoff”, in Kunst Heute 17 (Cologne, 1996), p. 31f.
2 Dieter Ronte, “Der wilde kleine Prinz”, in Siegfried Anzinger, Werke 1981–2001, exh. cat., Galerie Elisabeth und Klaus
Thoman (Innsbruck, 2002), p. 21ff.
3 Dickhoff 1996, p. 54f (see note 1).
4 Fax from Siegfried Anzinger to the author, August 2010.
5 Dieter Koepplin, “Gespräch mit Siegfried Anzinger”, Werke auf Papier 1977–1985, zwei Gemälde und eine Gruppe Plastiken,
exh. cat. Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Basel, 1985), p. 5.
6 Oberösterreichische Nachrichten February 6, 1986.
7 Fax from Siegfried Anzinger to the author, June 2010.
8 Wilfried Dickhoff, ed., “Interview von Pater Friedhelm Mennekes mit Siegfried Anzinger”, Siegfried Anzinger,
exh. cat. Kunst-Station Sankt Peter (Cologne, 1996), no pages.
9 Max Hollein, “Im Gespräch mit Siegfried Anzinger, Köln, 14.8.2002”, in Anzinger-Lebschik, (2002/2003), exh. cat. (Vienna,
2002), p. 13ff.
10 Werner Spies, ed., Picasso. Malen gegen die Zeit, exh. cat., Albertina, (Vienna, 2006), p. 35.
11 Wilfried Dickhoff, “Siegfried Anzinger im Gespräch mit Wilfried Dickhoff”, in Wilfried Dickhoff, ed., Siegfried Anzinger.
Backside Angels,
Abstraktion und Sexualität, exh. cat. Galerie Elisabeth und Klaus Thoman/Kunstmuseum (Mühlheim an der Ruhr, 2005), p. 6.
12 Koepplin, 1985 (see note 5); cf. note on last page.
13 Thomas Zaunschirm, “Cowboy oder Indianer? Picasso und die Theorie”, http://www.zaunschirm.de/Picasso.html
14 Brassaï, Gespräche mit Picasso (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1985), p. 140.
15 Zaunschirm p. 4 (see note 13).
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16 Zaunschirm p. 6.
17 Zaunschirm p. 5.
18 Walter Hess, Dokumente zum Verständnis der modernen Malerei, Rowohlts Enzyklopädie (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1988), p.
82.
19 Dickhoff 1996 S. 65 f (see note 1).
20 “…and if you let go of them, they’ll tear you apart. You’ve got tokeep them on the lead. Letting them off will lead painting right
into the arms of art…”
according to Siegfried Anzinger in Dickhoff 1996 p. 105 (see note 1).
21 Dickhoff 1996 p. 101 (see note 1).
22 Dickhoff 2005 p. 7 (see note 11).
23 Dickhoff 1996 p. 69 (see note 1).
24 Dickhoff 1996 p. 75 (see note 1).
25 Flash Art, November 1984, p. 19.
26 Dickhoff 1996 p. 82 (see note 1).
27 Dickhoff 1996 p. 109 (see note 1).
28 Dickhoff 1996 p. 65 (see note 1).
29 Wolfgang Drechsler, “Über das Lernen und die Malerei”, in Siegfried Anzinger, exh. cat., Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung
Ludwig 20er Haus
(Vienna, 1998), p. 68.
30 Dickhoff 1996 p. 109 (see note 1).
31 Dickhoff 2005 p. 5 (see note 11).
32 Wilfried Dickhoff, ed., Siegfried Anzinger. Damit sie den Himmel stört, exh. cat., Kunst-Station Sankt Peter (Cologne, 1996),
no pages.
Seite 19
Biography Siegfried Anzinger
1953
born on 25 February in Weyer Upper Austria
1971-76
studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with Maximilian Melcher
1982
moves to Cologne
1985
Oskar Kokoschka Award
1988
Venice Biennale, Austrian Pavillon
since 1997
Professor at the Art Academy, Düsseldorf
2004
Major Austrian State Award
Siegfried Anzinger lives in Cologne.
Numerous Solo and Group Exhibitions in Austria and abroad.
Seite 20
Press Images
Part of the following press photos are also available for downloading at www.lentos.at
1. SIEGFRIED ANZINGER
Portrait, 2010
Photo: maschekS.
2. SIEGFRIED ANZINGER
Hieronymo, 2010
Distemper on canvas
160 x 180 cm
Collection Garnatz
3. SIEGFRIED ANZINGER
Laughing man (Horst), 2009
Painted Terrakotta
22 x 16 x 20 cm
Private collection
4. SIEGFRIED ANZINGER
Untitled, 2010
Pencil/water colour
42 x 57 cm
Private collection
5. SIEGFRIED ANZINGER
Last supper, 2008
Distemper and ink on canvas
85 x 80 cm
Private collection Mayer
6. SIEGFRIED ANZINGER
Pornosdiaz, 2010
Distemper on canvas
75 x 65 cm
Private collection Tischler, Austria
Seite 21
7. SIEGFRIED ANZINGER
„Die Verzückung der Hl. Theresa“, 2010
Distemper on canvas,
235 x 165 cm
Private collection Schmölzer
8. SIEGFRIED ANZINGER
Train, 2010
Distemper on canvas
140 x 170 cm
Collection Birgit and Wolfgang Mayer
9. SIEGFRIED ANZINGER
Christoph, 1997
Distemper on Leinwand
230 x190 cm
Collection Eisenköck, Graz
10. SIEGFRIED ANZINGER
The broken day II, 1987/88
Diptych, Tempera on canvas
183 x 146 cm/183 x 71 cm
Collection Horst P. Wichmann
11. SIEGFRIED ANZINGER
Women pane, 2008
Glass pane in parish church Weyer, Upper Austria
630 x 140 cm
12-13. Ausstellungsansichten LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz
Fotos: maschekS. 2010
Seite 22