ArtistAustrianb.1937
Karl Korab
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There is a geological patience to Karl Korab's approach - his canvases and works on paper accumulate material the way a landscape accumulates sediment. Sand, ash, wood fragments, metal, and torn paper are pressed into painted surfaces alongside oil, creating works that document both what is seen and how it is built. This is not collage in the decorative sense but something more structural: the texture of a landscape interpreted through the texture of the making.
Korab was born on 26 April 1937 in Falkenstein, a small town in Lower Austria's Weinviertel, where his father worked as a head forester. The landscape around Falkenstein - the wide fields of the Weinviertel, the wooded heights of the Waldviertel to the north and west - became a persistent presence throughout his career. He has lived and worked for many years in Sonndorf near Maissau, keeping his practice embedded in the regional terrain he paints.
He entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 1957, studying under Sergius Pauser and Herbert Boeckl. Both were significant figures in Austrian modernism, and the academy during those years brought Korab into contact with the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism - Ernst Fuchs and his circle, who worked in a minutely detailed manner derived from the Old Masters and infused with surreal, symbolic content. Korab absorbed this influence without being consumed by it. By the mid-1960s he had moved away from that idiom and was developing the layered, material-rich approach that would define his mature work.
The turning point came partly through his discovery of collage as a constructive technique - not simply pasting imagery but incorporating non-paper materials directly into the painted surface. His subjects shifted toward landscapes from the Waldviertel and Weinviertel, still lifes, and occasional heads and figures rendered in a vocabulary that was neither naturalistic nor fully abstract but somewhere in the space between observation and structure.
In 1971 he signed a ten-year contract with the Jan Krugier Gallery in Geneva, a partnership that opened international exhibition circuits. Through Krugier, Korab showed work in Paris, London, New York, Brussels, Tokyo, Geneva, and Zurich - a range that gave his practice international exposure while his daily life remained rooted in Lower Austria. From 1960 onward he was represented in exhibitions at home and abroad; he became a member of the Künstlerhaus Wien in 1961, one of Austria's oldest artists' associations.
A solo exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in 1999, held at the Palais Harrach, brought his work into dialogue with one of Europe's major museum contexts. His paintings and prints are held in the collections of the San Jose Museum of Art, Museum Liaunig in Neuhaus (Carinthia), and the Strabag Kunstforum in Vienna. He designed a pack of playing cards for the publisher Piatnik - a characteristic extension of his graphic sensibility into applied form.
Awards include the cultural prize of Lower Austria (1972), the Golden Medal for Distinguished Service to Lower Austria on the occasion of a retrospective at Grafenegg (1997), and the Grand Decoration of Honour for Services to the Region of Lower Austria (2012).
On the Auctionist platform, Korab's 13 recorded works have all appeared at Dorotheum Vienna - the primary market for his work - spanning paintings, prints, drawings, and mixed media. At Dorotheum, realized prices across different auction categories have ranged from EUR 300 for a print to EUR 3,902 for a larger oil, with major works at im Kinsky reaching EUR 52,000 at hammer price. His prints and works on paper circulate regularly and tend to achieve EUR 300-850, making them an accessible entry point into his output.