Herwig Zens

(1943 – 2019)

Austria – Contemporary Art – Expressionism – Herwig Zens

Vita:

Herwig Zens decided to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 1961. After successfully completing his degree, he began teaching at high schools in Vienna. He was a passionate teacher who, with his knowledge and creativity, was able to inspire students for art and painting. During his time as a teacher he cultivated an intense friendship with Herbert Link, an Austrian filmmaker and art educator. Since then, Herwig Zens has enjoyed a multitude of films and reports that present both his life and his work. Apart from his passion for teaching, he dealt intensively with his artistic work. Herwig Zens soon earned a reputation as an excellent graphic artist and specialist in the dance of death. Herwig Zens went on a number of study trips abroad, which had a strong influence on him and thus also his work. Early on he developed a deep relationship with Spain in general and with Goya in particular, which in 2005 was the subject of a retrospective at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Works on this topic were the focus of the exhibition in September 2008 in the Lehner Gallery. The work he has created to date has received a large number of honors and prizes, including the Füger Prize, Theodor Körner Prize, the Gold Medal of Honor of the City of Vienna and the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art. Herwig Zens was appointed professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in 1987. In addition to this activity, he continuously presented his pictures at a large number of exhibitions. In 2006 he had to end his career as a professor at the academy due to illness. Since then he has concentrated even more on his passion, painting.

Work:

The gifted graphic artist has just found a technique in painting that allows him a further dimension of dynamism that he cannot live out on the eraser plate. His expressively used line also has an originally painterly function. A face is made up of a few flat lines, the tension of which is increased by color contrasts. While the graphic artist Zens works out a landscape with fine drawings and sophisticated technology, the painter Zens, in contrast, uses few reliable brushstrokes for a work. “Who dances with death” is the title of a film about Herwig Zens and describes very aptly how Zens approaches the subject. Even at a young age, Zens was forced to face the finiteness of existence. Trying to portray death as contemporaries is not feasible. This idea and conviction speaks from the work of the artist. Goya’s work in the last phase of his life is a subject that invites obsession. Above all, the „Pinturas Negras“ that Goya throws on the walls of his country estate between 1819 and 1823, go beyond the artistic forms of representation of the time. Without optimism, serene and cynical, the tragic elements of life are presented in all breadth and power. Goya paints himself into the collective memory in earthy and black tones and a previously unknown expressive design language and compositional freedom. Zen goes even further with current means and ways. He pulls out the nucleus from the now archaic representations such as the soup eaters or Saturn devouring his son and here puts a valid interpretation of Goya at disposal, expanded in color and line, and freed from all stylistic shackles of the 19th century. Century.