| MARKUS PRACHENSKY born 1932 in Innsbruck, living
in Wien
Rouges Differents sur Blanc,
In the mid-1950s, Prachensky found from a series of geometric paintings
a break-through into abstraction of gestures. The St Stephan Gallery,
founded by Monsignore Otto Mauer, offered him and his colleagues Josef
Mikl, Wolfgang Hollegha and Arnulf Rainer, a forum for exhibiting their
works in Austria, works that displayed a new and exciting expression.
The picture Rouges Differents sur Blanc, 70,5 x 130 cm, painted by Prachensky
in 1960, shows all the features of such a painting in its mood-directed
colour gestures. Not only these gestures and the spontaneous
action show the maximal personal participation of the artist at the time
of its creation. Colour drips and splashes of colour
point to and expose the actual verve of the painting activity. In
the painting, the artist only used the glowing single colour, a fiery
red, a colour to which the artist limited himself up to the 60s.
Markus Prachensky already belonged to the avant-garde in the late 50s and
he founded quite early, together with Arnulf Rainer, Maria
Lassnig and Oswald Oberhuber, the Austrian Informel movement, which
ran concurrently with the international movement and which was on
a par with it.
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