Josef Pillhofer

Josef PILLHOFER was born in Vien­na on 1 June 1921. He grew up in Mürz­zuschlag in Styr­ia and attend­ed the School of Arts and Crafts in Graz from 1938 to 1941. From 1946 to 1950 he stud­ied at the Acad­e­my of Fine Arts in Vien­na under Fritz Wotru­ba. A state schol­ar­ship took the artist to Paris, where he met Ossip Zad­kine, Con­stan­tin Bran­cusi and Hen­ri Lau­rens, among oth­ers, whose works sig­nif­i­cant­ly influ­enced his for­mal lan­guage. For Pill­hofer, the con­fronta­tion with these dif­fer­ent artis­tic lan­guages meant “the basis and start­ing point for every­thing else” after his return to Vien­na. The artist was rep­re­sent­ed with his works at the 1954 Venice Bien­nale, at the “Expo­si­tion inter­na­tionale de sculp­ture con­tem­po­raine” in the Musée Rodin in Paris and at the “9 scul­tori aus­triaci” in Flo­rence and in 1956 at the Venice Bien­nale. From 1954 to 1968 he taught as a lec­tur­er at the Acad­e­my of Fine Arts in Vien­na. In 1957 a three-month state schol­ar­ship took the artist to Rome. In 1964 he par­tic­i­pat­ed in the Inter­na­tion­al Exhi­bi­tion of Con­tem­po­rary Paint­ing and Sculp­ture at the Carnegie Insti­tute, Pitts­burgh, USA, in the World’s Fair in New York and in the Musée d’Art Mod­erne de la Ville de Paris, and in 1966 in the Nip­puten Exhi­bi­tion in Tokyo. In 1970 Josef Pill­hofer was appoint­ed pro­fes­sor of sculp­ture at the Kun­st­gewerbeschule in Graz and led a mas­ter class until 1981. In 1972, he was appoint­ed to the post of sup­pli­er pro­fes­sor for artis­tic design at the Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­si­ty of Graz. He held this posi­tion until 1974. In 1986 the sculp­tor lec­tured at the Inter­na­tion­al Sum­mer Acad­e­my in Salzburg. In 2006 Josef Pill­hofer bought an old sawmill hall in Neu­berg and start­ed to build his own sculp­ture hall which was opened in 2008. Pill­hofer was a mem­ber of the Art Club, a mem­ber of the Seces­sion and a found­ing mem­ber of the asso­ci­a­tion “Die Gruppe 59”. He received numer­ous awards and hon­ors, among oth­ers. the State Prize of the Acad­e­my of Fine Arts in Vien­na (1950), the Gift­ed Prize of the Acad­e­my of Fine Arts and the Pro­mo­tion Prize of the City of Vien­na (1952), the Theodor Körn­er Prize (1956), the Recog­ni­tion Prize of the Fed­er­al Min­istry of Edu­ca­tion (1958), the Aus­tri­an State Prize (1968), the Prize of the City of Vien­na (1979), the Appre­ci­a­tion Prize of the Province of Styr­ia (1983), the Great Cross of Mer­it of the Province of Styr­ia (1996) and the Aus­tri­an Cross of Hon­our for Sci­ence and Art (2009). The artist’s works are rep­re­sent­ed in numer­ous pri­vate and pub­lic col­lec­tions at home and abroad. There is noth­ing care­less, noth­ing extrav­a­gant, noth­ing super­flu­ous about Pillhofer’s sculp­tures. Form com­plex­es inter­pen­e­trate each oth­er, stag­ger rhyth­mi­cal­ly and build steps and over­hangs. Josef Pill­hofer dies on 30 July 2010 in Vienna.
1963 – first exhi­bi­tion in the gallery Welz.