ARTgerecht

“You always try to grasp life …”

Konrad Koller - general practitioner and outstanding artist

(Bild: Galerie Freihausgasse)

Highly underestimated and deeply ingenious: that is the expressive power of Konrad Koller, the great "old savage".

He was a general practitioner, persistent artist and misunderstood man of letters. But above all, Konrad Koller (1916 - 2011) was a gifted tightrope walker between the boundaries of the real. Before the exhibition opens next Tuesday in the Living Studio of the Klagenfurt Stadtgalerie, we take a look at the Villach artist's powerful oeuvre.

It will emerge from traditionalist beginnings in the style of his father Ewald, also a doctor and painter, to grow into fantastic independence, fueled by revered encouragers such as Herbert Boeckl or Anton Kolig, which sings of the hidden and puzzles the obvious.

Between dream and reality

(Bild: Alexander Gerdanovits)

The body - memento mori and vessel of life

(Bild: Alexander Gerdanovits)

Koller is always tempted by the woman. But apart from plump, buxom carnality and sharp-feathered social criticism, his image of man shines such an obvious memento mori from eye sockets and (dead) heads that the body increasingly seems to become a vessel for the surrealistic set pieces of life.

On the borderline of the spiritual
The graphic imagery, which he places alongside the texts at the beginning as an illustrator of his own stories, also lives from those sprawling, confused, seismographic fragments of worldly thoughts and dreams that so often settle in Koller's work in the border areas of the soul and reach into the content. Ironically underpinned, thoughtful, subtle and bizarrely abysmal are (almost) all of the content carriers up to the stroke in 1992, which he pacifies with airy watercolors and religious motifs.

Profile Konrad Koller

Born in Villach in 1916, Konrad Koller studied medicine and worked as a general practitioner in the town on the Drau for the rest of his life. But he has been painting and drawing since childhood.

Encouraged by Herbert Boeckl and Anton Kolig, the autodidact developed a fantastic oeuvre with a highly unique character between the themes of his life: art and profession - family and freedom - sexuality, religion, death.

Koller's works can be found in renowned museums, and he received numerous honors and awards during his lifetime.

A mirror of self-reflection
Koller's desires, fears, dreams, obsessions and moods fuel a work that is fantastic in many respects, telling of the powerful driving force of sexuality as well as the idle mechanisms and flights of fancy of human existence. And it is always the artist himself who looks at what he has experienced, felt, observed, desired and feared in the mirror of self-reflection and embeds it as a multi-layered record of a man caught between art, work, family, duty and pleasure.

And the woman lures forever

(Bild: Irina Lino)

Expressive painting power
The result is a distorted image that reflects everything that makes up a man's existence, from the carelessly scribbled, wildly proliferating ink and pencil drawings to the expressive painting frenzy. For as Konrad Koller, the "old savage", once said so characteristically of his work: "Nothing is greater than life itself. And one always tries to grasp it. Some with words, others perhaps with the camera. I chose the paintbrush to savor this pleasure for as long as possible."