Gunter Damisch

Damisch emerged in the early 1980s as part of the Viennese contingent of the Neue Wilde, a loose international current of young painters who responded to the perceived exhaustion of conceptualism with an emphatic return to expressive, figuration-charged painting. Alongside Otto Zitko and Hubert Scheibl, he participated in landmark group exhibitions including 'Hacken im Eis' at the Vienna Kunstlerhaus (then called 'House 20'), which helped define the Austrian branch of the movement. His early canvases combined the gestural intensity of the Neue Wilde with a distinctive cosmological imagination that would become his most recognisable quality.

Over the following decades, Damisch developed a visual system centred on the tension between macro and micro scales: forms that simultaneously suggest single-celled organisms, fungal networks, planetary surfaces, and galactic clusters. Rhizome-like tendrils and undulating lines spread across large-format canvases in dense, interlocking configurations. As he described it himself: 'My pictorial system is strongly guided by the idea of transformation and metamorphosis. These ambiguities fascinate me.' The work was multimedia from the beginning - painting, drawing, printmaking, ceramics, aluminium and bronze sculpture, photography, and collage all featured in a practice that refused narrow specialisation.

From 1992 until his death, Damisch held a professorship for graphic art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, the same institution where he had trained. He taught there for nearly a quarter century, influencing a generation of Austrian artists. His solo exhibitions reached the Albertina museum in Vienna in 2013 and the Museum Moderner Kunst Wörlen in Passau in 2014, and his work entered the permanent collections of the Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Vienna, and the Museum Liaunig in Neuhaus. He received a series of prizes across his career including the Römerquelle Art Prize (1983), the Otto Mauer Prize and Max Weiler Prize (1985), the Karl Rössing Prize (1991), and the City of Vienna Prize (1995). He died on 30 April 2016 in Vienna at the age of 57.

Damisch's work circulates primarily through Austrian and German auction houses. On the Auctionist platform his 12 lots are split between prints and engravings (8 lots) and paintings (4 lots), with active listings at Van Ham and Dorotheum Vienna. His titles - 'Zwei Pole', 'The hot fire I', 'Clarification' - reflect the same thematic concerns as his larger body of work. No final prices have been recorded in our database for his lots to date, though his works have been offered at Dorotheum and Van Ham consistently in recent months.