Heinz Frank
Heinz Frank was born in Vienna in 1939. After training as an electrical engineer, he studied architecture with Ernst Anton Plischke at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 1965 to 1969. Since the 1960s, he has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions: including at the Bureau des Réalités, Brussels, Belgium; Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz; Künstlerhaus Klagenfurt; Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna and Museum der Moderne - Rupertinum Salzburg, Austria. In 1986, Frank was awarded the City of Vienna Prize for Sculpture. In 2019, Kunsthalle Wien is dedicating a comprehensive solo exhibition to him on his 80th birthday. His works can be found, among others, at the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (mumok), the Museum für angewandte Kunst Wien (MAK), the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, the Museum der Moderne - Rupertinum Salzburg and the Generali Foundation Collection - permanent loan at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg. Ernst Frank passed away in Vienna in 2020.
From 1970 he worked as a sculptor and for a time as a furniture designer. He found points of contact with artists who worked in the 1960s and 1970s in Austria in the border area of art and architecture and created unconventional objects. For Frank, language has the character of a work. With his characteristic penchant for linguistic acrobatics, he gave his works literary, poetic-philosophical, sometimes ironic titles. Standing in the tradition of the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s, he did not distinguish between art and life. He kept his distance from the art business and worked throughout his life in a boundless field of interweaving material and language. The artist unpretentiously referred to his works as "things." The Generali Foundation Collection owns two " things" by Ernst Frank: "Der Hände Licht nach Innen spricht", 1987 and "Sitz doch Seele" 1990. In their interweaving of simple materials and poetic titles, both are typical examples of an artistic creation that playfully deals with our existence, images that are at once enigmatic and meaningful.
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