Franz Ecker

(1943-1999)

The Austrian painter, also Franz Xaver Ecker, was born in Bad Hall in 1943. Between 1957 and 1962 Franz Ecker attended the Episcopal Seminar for Teachers in Linz. Then he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where he received lessons in art education and painting from Professors Pauser and Böckl. In 1967 he passed the diploma examination as an academic painter. In 1965 and 1966 Ecker received the gold medal of the Füger Prize and made the acquaintance of Oskar Kokoschka. Between 1974 and 1999, numerous exhibitions of his works took place both at home and abroad. The exhibitions in the Lehner Gallery in Linz in 1974 and 1975 as well as those in the New York Gallery 128 in 1987 were groundbreaking for Ecker. On May 8, 1981, Ecker’s father was found hanged. A year later, on June 9th, the artist married his girlfriend Klaudia Sprengel. The divorce took place in 1992. In 1999 Franz Ecker died of the consequences of a serious liver disease in Leonding.

Since his untimely death in 1999, Franz Ecker’s work has undergone a long overdue re-evaluation, which is also manifested in numerous solo exhibitions, catalogs and a film that is well worth seeing. The extremely productive painter left behind an almost unmanageable oeuvre with an extreme stylistic breadth and a whole series of top works that are unparalleled in recent Austrian art history and whose significance has not yet been adequately understood. When Franz Ecker returned to Leonding in 1966 after studying with Sergius Pauser with two state prizes, he had already formulated a clear, abstract design language. Czeanne and Picasso are to be mentioned as sources of inspiration, but also Martin Polasek as teachers. They lead to a surface-accentuated abstract painting, which triggers a spatial experience through precise color coordination and strict composition. Franz Ecker’s painting experiences its strongest moments at the border between representationalism and abstraction. Only in the period up to around 1975 was there a large number of watercolors on this, Ecker using this medium for particularly lyrical works. If Franz Ecker is not counted among the canon of the avant-garde of the 1970s, it is because he refused the art market to the point of giving up himself. Instead of using the opportunities offered to him in Vienna, he went back to Linz after his time at the academy, which at the time offered neither understanding nor a market for his work. Cut off from the established art business, Ecker lives uncompromisingly the precarious life of a lonely genius. An artist myth, which in his case is of course a bitter reality. Unimpressed by this, Ecker developed an ever broader formal language within the clear line of abstract image conception, which he underlined with constantly new signature forms. At the end of the seventies his works became more gestural and expressive. Works such as Ecker’s “Kafka” anticipate the “Neue Wilden”. When these were celebrated a few years later as the “return of painting”, Franz Ecker confidently noticed in an interview that he couldn’t see much that was new here. He is still „a one-eyed among the blind“. At this point in time, Franz Ecker had already developed his style into a strongly structured flatness that is often compared to Keith Haring.

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