Sunday, June 24, 2007

Death announced of one of Gugging’s most famous artists


Oswald Tschirtner fought in the German army during the Second World War, and was institutionalised in 1946. A member of the Haus der Künstler in Gugging, Austria, he was encouraged to begin drawing by the hospital’s psychiatrist, Dr Leo Navratil. Tschirtner worked only after suggestion or encouragement, but from the outset his works have always been different from those of other residents. Using pen and ink, Tschirtner relied on a stark, highly controlled linear style to create repeated motifs.
His representations were almost entirely based on human figures, always elongated and mostly possessing little more than a distinctively shaped head and simple face to register them as being human the ‘Headfooters’. The mathematical equality in Tschirtner’s images, his sublime sense of space, and his use of line produce an infallible sense of calm and simplicity. The pictures were occasionally based on newspaper and magazine images or other works of art, but still worked in his elongated style. Tschirtner signed his pictures ‘O.T.’ and choose titles as simple and poetic as the pictures themselves: ‘Health’, ‘Line’, ‘Snow’, ‘People’ and ‘The Genius of Skyscrapers’. ( via rawvision)

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