Josef Bauer
As a young athlete, Josef Bauer won several national pole vault championships. Between 1956 and 1964, he studied painting at the Kunstschule, now the University of Arts and Design Linz, under Herbert Dimmel and created his first works. After the end of his sporting career, he became a civil servant, working in the Chamber of Agriculture in Linz. It was only after his retirement that he resumed his activities as an artist.
Josef Bauer had early exhibitions from 1960 to 1971, including regularly at the Galerie im Griechenbeisl, Vienna. The artist has been represented nationally and internationally in numerous group exhibitions, including 2005, Landesgalerie, Linz, AT; 2011, National Portrait Gallery, London, UK; 2015 Kunsthalle Mainz, DE; Kunsthalle Wien, AT; Landesgalerie, Krems, AT; 2015 and 2016, Neue Galerie Graz, AT; 2012, 2013, 2016, 2021, 21er Haus, resp. Belvedere21, Vienna, AT; 2013 and 2018 Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz, AT; 2020, Albertina Modern, Vienna, AT; 2022 Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst, Bremen, DE; Deutsches Buch- und Schriftmuseum, Leipzig, DE; 2023, Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck, AT; Museum of Contemporary Art (MSU), Zagreb, CRO; Kunsthaus Graz, AT, 2018 and 2024 MUSA, Vienna, 2018 and 2024 Museum der Moderne Salzburg, AT.
In 2019, the Belvedere21, Vienna, and in 2019-2020 the Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz, dedicated comprehensive retrospectives to the artist in Austria.
Josef Bauer received the City of Linz Culture Prize in 1994 and the Upper Austrian Culture Prize for Fine Arts in 1995. In 2017, he was awarded the Alfred Kubin Prize.
The artist died in 2022 in Linz, AT.
Only recently rediscovered, Bauer is one of the most important representatives of Conceptual art in Austria since the 1960s. In the circle of the Vienna Group including Gerhard Rühm, Friedrich Achleitner, and Oswald Wiener, he explored language and its relationship to the object through the art of concrete poetry, stating: “The picture keeps everything open and the language restricts.” He combined painting, object art, installation, and performance photography, striving to open the boundaries of traditional work categories to create complex interweavings
of content. Bauer's examination of the reporting on the political unrest of the student revolution in Paris in 1968 led to media-critical and politically reflective works with a demonstrative character. (Doris Leutgeb)
