This year’s fes­ti­val exhi­bi­tion at Galerie Welz is ded­i­cat­ed to two excep­tion­al fig­ures in Aus­tri­an art: the painter Peter Krawagna and the sculp­tor Andreas Urteil. Through a com­pelling jux­ta­po­si­tion, the exhi­bi­tion fos­ters a dia­logue between col­or and form, sur­face and vol­ume, and paint­ing and sculpture. 

Peter Krawagna, born in Kla­gen­furt in 1937, has been one of the defin­ing fig­ures in con­tem­po­rary Aus­tri­an paint­ing for decades. His works arise from an imme­di­ate per­cep­tion of nature: he dis­tills atmos­pher­ic light­ing, col­or reflec­tions, and impres­sions of the land­scape into min­i­mal­ist, clear­ly com­posed pic­to­r­i­al spaces. With­out pre­lim­i­nary stud­ies, Krawagna devel­ops his works direct­ly from the moment—spontaneously, with intense focus, and with great atmos­pher­ic depth. The exhi­bi­tion presents recent works on paper and canvas. 

In con­trast are the sculp­tures by Andreas Urteil (1933–1963), one of the most sig­nif­i­cant Aus­tri­an sculp­tors of the post­war peri­od. As a stu­dent and assis­tant to Fritz Wotru­ba, Urteil devel­oped a dis­tinc­tive, pow­er­ful for­mal lan­guage. Despite his ear­ly death, he left behind a remark­ably exten­sive body of work in stone, bronze, and wood that con­tin­ues to impress today with its archa­ic clar­i­ty and for­mal concentration.