Museum Hundertwasser

Friedensreich Hundertwasser
geboren am 15. Dezember 1928 in Wien als Friedrich Stowasser 
gestorben am 19. Februar 2000 an Bord der Queen Elisabeth 2 vor Brisbane

A major part of the effect of Hundertwasser's painting is color. Hundertwasser uses colors instinctively, without associating them with any sort of symbolism, either traditional or self-invented. He prefers intense, radiant colors and loves to place complementary colours next to one another.

Hundertwasser mastered and innovated many graphic techniques, among them lithograph, silk screen, etching, color woodcut and others. He was one of the first artists to demand and practice complete transparency in terms of technique, dates of creation and editions for each sheet.

Hundertwasser's first tapestry, 133 Pissing Boy with Skyscraper, was created in 1952 as the result of a bet. Hundertwasser had asserted that it was possible to weave a tapestry without a cartoon, i.e., a full-size cardboard model of the image that serves as template for the planned tapestry 

Starting with the Mouldiness Manifesto against Rationalism in Architecture, in which he opposed the “straight line” and demanded freedom to build for all people in 1958, Hundertwasser followed up with Speech in the Nude for the Right to a Third Skin and the manifesto Loose from Loos, increasingly and ever more profoundly writing against the building culture at the time

Hundertwasser called for the individual, artistic design of all areas of life. In a time of mediocrity, aesthetic emptiness and the soullessness of the prefabricated, he sought to fulfil people's hidden longing for diversity and beauty in harmony with nature. 

Hundertwasser’s popularity is not only based on the mass appeal of his paintings and his visionary architecture, but today more than ever also on his active dedication to and many interventions on behalf of comprehensive nature- and environment protection. Just like he showed the people possibilities of a better world and finding a way back to paradise in his pictures 

From 1969 to 1972, Peter Schamoni made a documentary film together with Friedensreich Hundertwasser, presenting the career, working methods and thoughts of this unusual artist. The film shows Hundertwasser in his studio in Vienna, in his sawmill in the Waldviertel, in Venice

A Film by Peter Schamoni

I was the first at school who could draw in a properly perspective way and the first who stopped because that was not how I wanted to draw. Friedensreich Hundertwasser