Robert Hammerstiel

(*1933)

Austria – Contemporary Art –Pop Art– Robert Hammerstiel

Vita:

Robert Hammerstiel managed to escape from the former Yugoslavia to Vienna in 1947. He recognized his affinity for painting early on. At the age of 26 he began studying fine arts in Vienna with Professor Gerda Matejka-Felden. Only 2 years later he received the advancement award for painting of the Austrian trade union federation. In the following years he learned from Robert Schmidt, Gerhard and August Swoboda in Vienna. In 1968 he enjoyed his first solo exhibition. Numerous study trips all over Europe, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, USA, especially New York shaped his masterful genius. This was followed by further exhibitions, the honorary guarantee from the city of Werschetz and, to top it off, the opening of the Robert Hammerstiel Museum in Werschetz.

Work:

According to Hammerstiel, the perfect interplay of colors and shapes to create a coherent unit is the primary goal of every work. The exhaustion of the possibilities of abstraction is a constant tightrope act in Hammerstiel’s more recent works. Fields of tension between people and objects are presented in such a way that the viewer can still intuit them. The further the abstract, the more obvious the compositional intent of the painter becomes. The story behind the picture is only hinted at and has to be completed by the viewer himself. The artist consciously avoids abstraction without figurative reference in order not to slip into narrative arbitrariness. Through abstraction and reduction, Hammerstiel creates an inventory of figures and objects that act like archetypes directly on the viewer. The two-dimensional figures – often with typical headgear or symbolic clothing – tell their story through their relationship to a reduced space, a narrowing perspective or signal-like inventory such as a lamp or an empty cup. The captured moment leaves a lot of space for reflections on the before and after, the strict painterly frame elevates what is depicted to a general statement. Robert Hammerstiel shows a completely different world in the medium of drawing: the lack of color reveals an expressive and mystical world with accents and contours and a much higher objectivity. The comparisons of motifs that were solved both painterly and graphically, such as “The old man on the bridge”, are often particularly interesting. New York marks a turning point in the painterly work of Robert Hammerstiel. The artist suddenly sees and interprets his work in a completely new way. In contrast to his earlier works, in which earthy colors dominated, his pictures now shone in strong, cheerful and bright colors. In American Pop Art he found new points of reference and relatives that he missed in Austria. Such a dramatic and irreversible change in style at an advanced age is only known to me from Christian Rohlfs, who, like Hammerstiel, was still open to radically new things in old age.