KunstenaarAustrian
Friedensreich Hundertwasser
1 actieve items
Friedrich Stowasser was born in Vienna on December 15, 1928, into a city already trembling under the pressures of economic collapse and rising nationalism. His father died in 1929, leaving his mother Elsa to raise him alone. Elsa was Jewish; after the Anschluss in 1938, she was forced to register Friedrich as a Mischling - a person of mixed heritage under Nazi law - and this protected them both, narrowly. Sixty-nine of their close relatives were deported and killed in the concentration camps. The experience of surviving surrounded by catastrophe, of being simultaneously inside and outside the categories that determined life and death, marked the boy who would later insist on building a worldview entirely his own.
After the war, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, but stayed for only three months. Formal instruction felt irrelevant to what he was already doing. He began signing his work "Hundertwasser", a German translation of the Slavic prefix in his family name: Sto means "one hundred", Wasser means "water". The full name he adopted, Friedensreich Hundertwasser Regentag Dunkelbunt, accumulated layers of meaning over his lifetime - Peace-Kingdom Hundred-Water Rainy Day Dark-Colourful.
Through the early 1950s he traveled extensively in Italy, Morocco, Tunisia, and Japan. In 1953, the spiral appeared for the first time as a structuring element in his painting and never left. He described it as the fundamental form of life, the antithesis of the straight line he despised. "The straight line is godless and immoral," he wrote in his 1957 Mouldiness Manifesto, a polemic against rationalist architecture and standardized building that preceded the ecological turn in architecture by decades. He argued that the human body required irregular floors, walls that breathe, and the presence of vegetation - that a dwelling shaped only by industrial logic was a kind of violence against its inhabitants.
His paintings from this period - dense, layered, building organic forms out of interlocking spirals in intense, non-naturalistic color - drew comparisons to Klimt and the Vienna Secession while remaining entirely distinct in sensibility. The work gained international attention rapidly: a retrospective at the Venice Biennale in 1962, the Mainichi Prize at the 6th International Art Exhibition in Tokyo in 1961. He moved fluidly between media: oil on canvas, watercolor, tapestry, postage stamp design, architecture.
Printmaking became central to how Hundertwasser disseminated his vision. He worked in lithography, etching, silkscreen, and color woodcut, often combining techniques on a single sheet. In 1961, contact with Japanese ukiyo-e printing methods opened the possibility of gradations of color impossible through mechanical means. The graphic editions he produced from the late 1960s onward were explicitly conceived to make original work accessible - "Good Morning City - Bleeding Town" (1969-70), a serigraph with metal embossing issued in 40 color variants and an edition of 8,000, distilled his urban philosophy into a format that could reach apartments and classrooms.
His philosophy extended to what he called the Five Skins of Man: the epidermis, clothing, the house, social identity, and the planetary environment. Each was a domain of human expression that industrial modernity had flattened into conformity. The Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna, designed in 1983 and completed in 1986, was the built argument: an apartment block with undulating floors, grass-covered roofs, and trees growing directly from windows. It remains one of Austria's most-visited landmarks.
In the 1970s, Hundertwasser emigrated to the Far North of New Zealand, where he lived on a remote farm for much of the rest of his life. He died aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2 on February 19, 2000, while crossing the Pacific, and was buried on his New Zealand property.
On the Nordic auction market, Hundertwasser's graphic editions circulate steadily, primarily through Stockholms Auktionsverk in Hamburg and Gothenburg, Garpenhus Auktioner, and Palsgaard Kunstauktioner. The 40 lots on Auctionist span prints, paintings, and drawings. The most sought-after title is consistently "Good Morning City - Bleeding Town," with examples selling in the 15,000-16,000 SEK range. "Hommage à Schröder-Sonnenstern" has achieved over 13,500 EUR at auction. The record price for the artist internationally stands at $618,792, for the painting "Ville vue d'au-delà du soleil" at Christie's Paris in 2017.