OSWALD TSCHIRTNER* (Perchtoldsdorf 1920 - 2007 Maria Gugging)
A high jump, 1979
indian ink/paper, 29,5 x 21 cm
monogrammed O.T., dated 1979, entitled A high jump

ESTIMATE € 1000 - 3000
STARTING PRICE € 1000

Oswald Tschirtner was an Austrian artist from the 20th century and one of the most important exponents of post-1950 modernism and Art Brut, or Outsider Art as defined by Jean Dubuffet. Along with August Walla, Johann Fischer, Johann Hauser and Ernst Herbeck, he is one of the most well-known artistic positions from Gugging. He came from a strict catholic family and originally wanted to be a priest. But he was drafted into military service, was first in Stalingrad and then in a French prisoner war camp and in the so-called barbed wire seminar in Chartres. After the Second World War he suffered from hallucinations, was committed to a psychiatric hospital and lived in Gugging from 1954 and later in the Artists' House there. Tschirtner began drawing in the 1960s at the suggestion of the director of Gugging Leo Navratil. In 1968/69 he made some etchings; In 1970 he took part in the exhibition Pareidolia in the gallery next to St. Stephan with three of his etchings. Oswald Tschirtner's successful artistic career began in 1971. His drawings are characterized by a minimalist and abstract style. The artist's best-known motif is the sexless cephalopod, the depiction of a human being whose torso is missing or has shrunk considerably and is usually outlined by four elongated extremities. In 1997 a sculpture based on a drawing by Tschirtner: the memorial "Against forgetting" on the grounds of the Innsbruck State Hospital.

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