'Nureyev didn't stand still in the State Opera when I was working' 'I paint the movement. Then
it's dance! Dance is dynamic!' said Franz Grabmayr (1927-2015) in the 1980s about his 'dance
paintings'. The post-abstract Viennese painter started his own group of works around 1971 at
the Vienna State Opera during ballet training and in the evenings during shows where he could
stand in a corridor next to the stage virtually between two different curtains with a view
of the performances. Using charcoal and colored inks he captured the shapes of moving human
bodies on paper. In a way according to Robert Fleck he has once again activated the studio
practice of Auguste Rodin who often had several nude models walking freely around the room
while he modeled them. In Franz Grabmayr's work however the models are expressively
exaggerated in the sense of Cézanne's modulation just as in his earlier landscape paintings.
'The figure is actually torn apart when a dancer works very dynamically when she moves more
slowly the leaves become flatter. I often let the dancers judge my leaves because they have
felt what they have danced. And if they can see the feeling in the sheet then the sheet is
good for them. Nureyev didn't stand still in the State Opera when I was working. And so I
learned to paint rhythmic contexts out of movement.' Robert Fleck therefore relates this
approach to the programmatic statements of the avant-garde movement of the 1960s which
propagated the utopian ideal of "direct art".Franz Grabmayr's works were closely linked to this
idea which is why the works of Frank Auerbach Eugène Leroy or Chaim Soutine can also be
considered 'relatives'. Yet Franz Grabmayr's painting remains solitary his straw bale motifs
grain fields trees and rootstocks his landscape painting and his works on dance and opera are
a rejection of any heaviness in painting. If you wish you can also see in his landscape
painting an early artistic addressing of ecological themes. The far more successful young
generation of Austrian artists in the 1980s discovered Franz Grabmayr early on as a point of
reference. And the exhibition of his work that has just opened at the Albertina in Vienna
(until October 2024) now definitively places him in the canon of modern art. And his 'dance
sheets' and 'dance pictures' float in space standing 'for lightness' as the press writes.
Exhibition: Vienna State Opera 7 9 2024 - 30 1 2025
