Biography
JOSEF WINKLER (1925–2025)
Education and Early Years
Josef Winkler was born on November 15, 1925, in Vienna. In 1946, he attended the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt. From 1947 to 1948, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in the classes of Josef Dobrowsky and attended figure drawing classes with Herbert Boeckl. Between 1948 and 1950, he received a scholarship to the Art School in Guildford near London.
During this early period, he was closely associated with the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, while already seeking an independent visual language beyond figuration.
Interruption and New Beginning
In order to support himself and his mother, Winkler had to earn money quickly and set aside painting. He worked successfully for several decades as an art dealer, specializing primarily in Classical Modernism of the 20th century and the School of Paris.
After a long process of maturation, Winkler devoted himself exclusively once again to the fulfillment of his artistic aspirations from 1989 onward, returning to painting with passion and consistency. Influenced by the artists and formal language of Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel, he rapidly developed his own distinctive visual language.
Painting and Themes
Central themes such as metamorphosis, as well as the tension between beginning and end — alpha and omega — increasingly come to the forefront. The works gain in depth and expressive power and demonstrate a consistent development of his artistic approach, as well as an ongoing dialogue between the work and the artist, as he himself repeatedly emphasized.
Winkler spoke less of abstraction than of non-representational painting. What we see, for him, is stored internally; in the process of translating this onto the pictorial surface, the aim is not narrative motifs but a reduction to a spiritual and psychological essence.
His paintings are built in layers: paint is applied, overpainted, disrupted, and reopened. Thick applications of paint, earthy tones, handprints, scratch marks, and incorporated signs or inscriptions render the surface a physical repository of time and experience.
Characteristic are serial groups of works such as the cycles “Metamorphoses” or “From Alpha to Omega,” in which transformation, becoming and passing, as well as eroticism and passion, become central themes. Winkler worked daily in the studio and was more obsessed with painting than merely devoted to it.
He understood each work as a new beginning: the risk of failure, the overpainting and destruction of supposedly “finished” solutions are integral parts of his working process. From this consistency emerges a body of work that is at once physical and reflective, sensual and rigorous.
The exploration of transformation, detachment, and new beginnings also takes on an existential dimension, not least in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic marked by isolation and uncertainty, the war between Russia and Ukraine, and a renewed confrontation with and processing of his own experiences of the Second World War.
Both the works on traditional supports and the creation of assemblages appear at once calmer and more centered, yet also condensed and charged with a particular emotional intensity, resulting in a profound and reflective quality. At the same time, the motif of transformation, detachment, and renewal remains central throughout.
