Wolfgang Glechner

(*1951)

Wolfgang Glechner is self-taught, was born in 1951 near Braunau am Inn and has lived as a freelance artist in Vienna since 1990. Since 1998 Glechner has been working in oil and acrylic according to his own developed „separation color theory“. Before that, it was mainly black and white pen drawings and etchings, which were initially influenced by his teachers A. Paul Weber (Hamburg) and Helmut Huber (Salzburg). Short animated films for TV and the Internet are also made later.

Anyone who knows Wolfgang Glechner’s graphic work will not believe that the maximum number of colorful works on canvas come from the same artist. As a draftsman and eraser, Glechner does not leave out any detail and does not evade a certain tendency towards romanticism, but in his painterly works the contrast is program, the lines generous and the effect striking in the best sense of the word. What apparently eludes any theory and trend is actually based on a theoretical consideration of how colors can be set in such a way that they have the greatest possible contrast to one another. Conveniently, the painter himself wrote the theory himself, making the leap from black and white to large color format.

Wolfgang Glechner likes to describe himself as an “Innviertler in Vienna” and uses a painterly and literary way of looking at the urban world of life. It is not the anonymity of the big city that attracts Glechner; he is more interested in the stories and characters of its protagonists – protagonists who are not in the front row. Charming scenes in the ice cream shop or at the animal coiffeur, overburdened waiters at the battle at the buffet or the nice ladies during the busy cold calling, bathed in colors that make even street art sprayers look pale. His most recent works, in which distinctive faces look out of cars pulling up on their belts, cite the New Objectivity from Berlin in the 1920s.

Glechner is particularly impressed by the microcosm of the Viennese belt. Like hardly any other contemporary, he manages to banish the Grätzel mood on canvas. Again and again it brings the pulsating outer ring together to form a compact world in which creativity and color prevail over the suburban tristesse that is completely alien to Glechner. At Glechner’s belt, cars, people and animals are on the same level. Animals are also the starting point for fleeing urban life. At the city limits in Schönbrunn, Glechner records the prancing of the fat elephant’s buttocks, which is intensified by the shimmering colors.

Even before Glechner started to write, he was already telling stories – using painting. The all too real everyday life is given a garish paintwork and invites you into a parallel universe in which there is a winking punchline at the end.

If you would like to buy works by the artist Wolfgang Glechner online, you will find examples here in our gallery.