Loner of the scene

Viennese painter Jürgen Messensee dies

Jürgen Messensee

(Bild: APA/GEORG HOCHMUTH)

The painter Jürgen Messensee has died. Born in Vienna, he was one of the great mavericks of the Austrian art scene, who had carved out a special position for himself between the Informel and Tachism movements. For him, painting was a "method of thinking", as he once explained. The painter has now died at the age of 88, as confirmed by Messensee's family.

Jürgen Messensee's last major solo exhibitions were at the Kunstforum in Vienna in 2013 and at the Museum Angerlehner in Thalheim near Wels in 2014, and he was given his own room at the Albertina in 2015 as part of the show "Abstraction in Austria". In 2006, the art historian Caroline Messensee, who died the previous year, organized an exhibition of her father's work in the Essl Collection.

Prominent collectors
Messensee's collectors also include Elfriede Jelinek, who gave her speech on receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, which was recorded by Swedish television, in front of a painting by the artist. In her text "Jürgen Messensee: best work!", Jelinek wrote: "The pictures do not put on their colors to prove that they are there, trapped on their background, and then they just somehow mean art, but these pictures exhibit their work of creation and then progressing within themselves."

Messensee's works at the Kunstforum in Vienna in 2013

(Bild: APA/GEORG HOCHMUTH)

(Bild: APA/GEORG HOCHMUTH)

Messensee was born in Vienna on August 29, 1936 and studied under Sergius Pauser at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts from 1955 to 1960. In 1973 he took part in the XII. Biennial of Sao Paulo in 1973. Messensee's exhibitions have included 1987 at the Vienna Secession (where he was a member from 1973 to 2000) and at the Kunsthalle Bremen, 1990 at the Albertina, 1993 at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, 2003 for the opening of the Lentos Kunstmuseum, 2006 at the Essl Collection in Klosterneuburg and 2010 at Galerie Welz. Over 200 national and international exhibitions have honored the artist, who was awarded the "Golden Decoration of Honor for Services to the State of Vienna" in 2007.

Female body as the dominant element
An extended stay in France had a significant influence on him, and at the beginning of the 1980s Messensee turned to classical models such as the late Titian, Cézanne and Velázquez for a while. Studying the portraits of the Spanish court painter in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum inspired him to create his interpretations of the "Infantines".

One of Messensee's favorite themes throughout his life was the female body as a metaphor for reality - whether as an entire figure, alone or doubled, as a portrait or as a fragment of the body. The artist liked to condense and abstract in a few strokes in combination with color fields of orange, red and pink. His question with regard to painting was "how information about art can be communicated through painting under the conditions of our time". For Jürgen Messensee, painting was a discipline that observes the world: "As a painter, I reflect on what happens in order to lead this resonance into something superordinate."