| FRANZ JOSEF
ALTENBURG Ceramics |
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| 28 June to 23 September 2001 | |||||||||||||
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View
of the Altenburg-Exhibition at the Neue Galerie View of the Exhibition |
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| The exhibition at the Neue Galerie
of the City of Linz presents a representative cross-section of Franz Josef
Altenburg's ceramic objects from 1975 to 2000. The ceramics artist was born in 1941 in Bad Ischl, Upper Austria, and attended Prof. Hans Adametz' ceramics class at the Arts and Crafts School in Graz from 1958 to 1962. From 1962 to 1964, he worked at the Hallstätter Ceramics workshops under Prof. Gudrun Wittke-Baudisch. The subsequent years were marked by trips abroad (guest residency at the Ceramics School Faenza; Jean Claude de Crousaz' workshops in Geneva). He became a master of pottery craft at the Hallstätter Ceramics workshops under Gudrun Wittke-Baudisch. In 1969 he became a member of the Gmundner Ceramics "Group H", together with Gudrun Wittke-Baudisch and Anton Raidel. Since 1978, Franz Josef Altenburg has been working freelance in his own workshop in a former farmhouse in Upper Austria. Since 1969, he has taken part in various competitions and ceramics symposiums, and his objects have been presented at numerous exhibitions at home and abroad. His works are found in public and private collections. In the field of sophisticated contemporary ceramics in Austria, Altenburg is highly regarded by connoisseurs and artists. He is a master of his craft through and through, consistently following his own path and preferring what is robust, sturdy and matter-of-fact to that which is emphatically artificial, too complicated or too filigreed. The artist, who prefers to refer to himself as a "potter", meets an almost archaic need with his ceramic objects: forming clay to give meaningful expression to a thing and assign it a function. The exhibition catalogue "Elemente, Objekte", published by the MAK with texts by Franz Josef Czernin and Bodo Hell, costs ATS 360,- / € 26,10. |
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