Between Venice Innsbruck and Florence the Austrian painter Franz Jenull (1949-2017) developed
- after his studies with Emilio Vedova at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice - in many
layers of paint and overpainting 'sharpenings' as he calls them and in an interplay of
spontaneity and control a non-figurative painting that combines color and form to create a
poetic density that is also musical in its rhythm thus opening up completely new pictorial
spaces. His artistic work developed dialectically between figurative and abstract from 1980
onwards is one of the passages. He dissolves the dichotomy between figuration and abstraction
that has been carried on since the modernity and according to Gilles Deleuze leads it into
the 'figural'. The anatomical figure remains the focus of his interest and stands at the
beginning of each of his paintings. 160 illustrations divided into four groups of works
provide the first overview of and insight into the artist's solitary pictorial work. The three
phases of his work become visible from the informal paintings at the very beginning to the
'color bar paintings' at the beginning of the 1990s to the 'all over painting' of his late
work.
