GUSTAV HESSING (Czernowitz 1909 - 1981 Vienna), Still Life

GUSTAV HESSING*
(Czernowitz 1909 - 1981 Vienna)
Still Life
oil/canvas, 33,4 x 47 cm
verso estate stamp Gustav Hessing, Gallery Peithner-Lichtenfels
Provenance: estate of the artist, gallery Peithner-Lichtenfels Austria, private collection Vienna

ESTIMATE € 5.000 - 10.000
START € 5.000

Austrian artist of the 20th century. Main representative of Austrian Expressionism, Color Expressionism and Classical Modernism. From 1936 to 1940 student of sculpture with W. Gössner and painting under Rudolf Szyszkowitz at the School of Arts and Crafts in Graz. Studied from 1947 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna with Herbert Boeckl. Influenced by the early expressionism of Richard Gerstl, Herbert Boeckl and Jean Egger. In his exploration of color and form, he created primarily landscapes and still lifes with an impasto and gestural application of paint.

Karl Stark was born in Glojach in Styria in 1921 as the son of a teacher. Since his artistic interest was initially in the three-dimensional, he began studying sculpture at the Graz School of Applied Arts in 1936. Because the subsequent military service made it impossible for him to start a career quickly, he decided to continue his art studies after the end of the war. However, he now decided to study painting with Rudolf Szyszkowitz and – after moving to Vienna in 1947 – with Herbert Boeckl at the Academy of Fine Arts. Since in the official art scene almost only abstract painting was acclaimed as an innovation by art critics and many artists, Stark increasingly distanced himself from the Viennese art scene and finally moved to the Drautal with his family in 1951. He then commuted weekly from his Carinthian domicile to Linz, where he taught at the School of Applied Arts. Karl Stark only returned to Vienna in 1958. There he was able to devote himself entirely to painting again. The still life created in 1957 also dates to this period of upheaval. It refers to the French painter Paul Cézanne as a figure of reverence both in its structure and in its painting. Stark also refers to this pioneering Frenchman in the arrangement of the still life: He places the white fruit bowl with the apples in shades of orange and red at a slight angle on a carefully laid out white tablecloth. This Cézanne reference also applies to the color contrasts between the warm red tones of the apples and the shadowy blue-grey of the tablecloth. However, Karl Stark's experiences in sculpture also established his own deep understanding of form, space and plasticity. Stark's decision in favor of an impasto style of painting as well as a gestural and powerful brushwork probably came from his examination of Boeckl's still life painting. Like him, Stark also deals with the traditional pictorial solutions of classical modernism at the crossroads between representationalism and abstraction. His special concern is the interplay of colour, form and structure and their connections, as he also underpins this in terms of art theory: “Form and color have to work together in order to produce something new. Through the conscious formation of form, the designed color becomes substance.”

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