KURT HÜPFNER | Individuelle Mythologien
14. November - 19. Dezember 2024

Kurt Hüpfner has spent almost his entire life away from the art world and has created an impressive oeuvre consisting of over 2500 drawings, almost 200 sculptures, 120 paintings as well as numerous assemblages and collages. Despite, or perhaps precisely because, he worked in secret for so long, he developed his own, powerful visual language.

Born in 1930, he grew up in Vienna during the Second World War; his childhood memories are characterized by bombing raids, air raid shelters and post-war chaos. These traumatic experiences continue to flow into his entire work. From 1947 to 1950 he completed training as a commercial graphic artist at the Higher Graphic Training and Research Institute in Vienna.

In 1963, the artist created his first sculpture, Lady with a Beautiful Hairstyle, which is characterized by a radical reduction of physiological features to simple geometric shapes. This reduction to the surface and form runs through the rest of her work. Hüpfner says himself: “I’m only interested in the form, then I pour the contents into it.”

The themes that concern the artist range from history to religion and myth to the world of premonition. His oeuvre often features tragic heroes from mythology and religion. The concept of the omen plays a lasting role, in Hüpfner's understanding the feeling of the presence of "an invisible third party", he calls it the "numinous" - horrifying and attractive at once. In doing so, he distances himself from the Christian faith and remains in a decidedly pessimistic mood: “Light figures, they don’t exist for me. But I do believe in the darkness that is so threatening.” This is how the central series of works Omen comes into being, which documents the numinous in the form of everyday encounters with people and things.

In his oeuvre, Kurt Hüpfner gives the viewer an insight into the events, religions and myths of our world. Each work of art bears its personal signature of contour, surface and shape - it gives us an idea of how the artist perceives the world.

Text: Selin Stütz-Staudinger