KunstenaarAustriangeb.1930–ov.2015
Ernst Fuchs
0 actieve items
Ernst Fuchs was born on 13 February 1930 in Vienna, the only child of Maximilian and Leopoldine Fuchs. He showed precocious ability, attending the St. Anna Painting School in 1944 under Fritz Fröhlich, and entered the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna the following year at the age of fifteen, studying first under Professor Robin Christian Andersen and then moving to the class of Albert Paris von Gütersloh. At the Academy he met Arik Brauer, Rudolf Hausner, Wolfgang Hutter, Anton Lehmden, and Fritz Janschka - the group of painters who would together define what became known as the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism (Wiener Schule des Phantastischen Realismus).
The movement grew from a shared determination to recover the symbolic density and technical precision of Northern European late Gothic and Renaissance painting - Dürer, Grünewald, Altdorfer, Schongauer - against both the decorative abstraction of postwar modernism and the Social Realist orthodoxies of the East. Fuchs developed and championed the mischtechnik, a technique in which egg tempera is used to model form and volume, then glazed with oil paint mixed with resin to create a luminous, jewel-like surface. The method produces a depth of color and clarity of fine line that connects his canvases visually to early Flemish panel painting even when the subject matter draws on Jewish mysticism, alchemical symbolism, or ancient mythology.
Between 1950 and 1961, Fuchs lived primarily in Paris, making extended journeys to the United States and Israel. He immersed himself in the sermons of Meister Eckhart, Jungian psychology, and the symbolism of the alchemists. A residency at the Dormition Abbey on Mount Zion in Jerusalem led to a monumental work depicting the Last Supper. In 1958 he co-founded the Galerie Fuchs-Fischoff in Vienna to exhibit younger painters working in the Fantastic Realist vein. His graphic work from this period produced several major print cycles: Unicorn (1950-52), Samson (1960-64), Esther (1964-67), and Sphinx (1966-67) - works that combined etching and aquatint to achieve a tonal range rivaling his paintings.
In 1972, Fuchs purchased the derelict Otto Wagner Villa in the Hütteldorf district of Vienna and spent years restoring it as both his studio and a monument to fantastic realist painting. The villa opened as the Ernst Fuchs Museum in 1988. His distinctions included the Vienna Prize for Visual Arts (1972), the title of Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters from France (2000), the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, 1st Class (2009), and the Gold Medal of Honor for Services to the City of Vienna (2010). In 1993 he was given a retrospective at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. Fuchs died in Vienna on 9 November 2015.
In the Scandinavian auction market, Fuchs appears primarily through Dorotheum Vienna and Stockholms Auktionsverk Köln, which together account for 17 of 22 items in our database. The 7 currently active lots reflect ongoing demand. Works on paper and prints dominate - "Flora" (1989, color lithograph) reached 10,714 SEK at the top of our recorded results, while the print portfolio "Beneath the Tree" and individual color lithographs typically trade in the 2,000-5,000 SEK range. Original paintings are rare at Nordic auction; buyers seeking those tend to look to im Kinsky and Dorotheum in Vienna.