Gottfried Mairwöger (1951-2003)

Born in the small village of Tragwein, Austria in 1951, Gottfried Mairwöger attended local schools before enrolling in a boarding school in nearby Linz, the regional capital of Upper Austria, at the age of 14. In 1971, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and worked under the tutelage of the renowned abstractionists Josef Mikl and Wolfgang Hollegha.

Beginning with nude drawings, still lives, and landscapes, Mairwöger began to show in Vienna in the mid-1970s. Very quickly, he transitioned into a relatively new type of abstraction that had been termed Color Field painting, which was a style and group of techniques that emerged in the U.S. during the post-war years. Success came soon, and by 1975, he was given a solo show at the prestigious Ulysses Gallery in Vienna - the same gallery that represented his famous teachers, Mikl and Hollegha.

He began to show across Europe, and in 1976, was invited to participate in a group exhibition of Austrian artists at Wentzel Gallery in Hamburg, Germany. It was at this event that he became acquainted with the influential American art critic Clement Greenberg, who shortly thereafter invited Mairwöger to begin showing in the U.S. This relationship with Greenberg would significantly influence the rest of his career, as he became engrossed in the Color Field movement and its vanguard artists such as Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler, and Kenneth Noland. At the same time, he befriended emerging artists Kikuo Saito and Larry Poons, who have since become increasingly important post-war painters in their own right. During this period, Mairwöger exhibited with famed gallerists André Emmerich in New York and Eva Cohon in Chicago.

Mairwöger's life was tragically cut short, with his passing in 2003 at the age of 52. With a legacy as one of Austria's most important painters of the 20th century, his work can be found in many esteemed private and public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, mumok, Vienna, the Albertina, Vienna, and the Estée Lauder Collection, New York.

Source: Estate of Gottfried Mairwöger