Wolfgang Herzig
To his 75th Birthday
New Oil Paintings and Works on Paper
Since the early 1960s there have been several exhibitions in Germany and abroad each year with Herzig's paintings. In addition to the Academy of Fine Arts, the Belvedere, the MUMOK or the BAWAG Foundation, it was above all the Essl Museum, which repeatedly dedicated exhibitions to the artist in the last 20 years. In 2011, the Essl Collection in Klosterneuburg presented a comprehensive exhibition on the artist, some of which was compiled from its own collections but also on loan from private collectors. The Museum Liaunig also honored the artist and his fellow painters of the group Realities (M. Jungwirth, P. Pongratz, R. Zeppel-Sperl, K. Kocherscheidt and F. Ringel) in 2015 in a comprehensive exhibition.
Suppan Fine Arts presented a selection of Herzig's large-format oil paintings for the first time in 2013, complemented by his large-format chalk and acrylic works. These meticulously crafted compositions were subsequently transferred in the same format to the canvas by the artist in oil and allowed for the first time a look into his working methods.
As announced at the time, this presentation will now be continued with the second part of the exhibition project, which will be shown on the occasion of Herzig's 75th birthday, as of 8 November in the gallery. On display are large-format recent works in oil and chalk, which were created in 2013/15.
Wolfgang Herzig represents an expressive variant of a constructive figuration. The pictorial themes are allegories of the different situations of life and do not represent an affirmative world view as presented by our hedonistic consumer world. On the contrary, Wolfgang Herzig reveals the absurdities of life, in which tragedy and comedy are often inseparable. In this sense, he joins the tradition of thinking of painters such as Breugel, Hogarth or Toulous-Lautrec, which have not lost their validity until today.
