Josef Bauer

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.

Bauer undertook visionary artistic approaches and is one of the most important representatives of conceptual art in Austria since the 1960s, who has only been discovered and recognized in recent years. In the circle of the Vienna Group with its representatives Gerhard Rühm, Friedrich Achleitner and Oswald Wiener, he thematized language in the manner of concrete poetry, examined its relationship to the object and was of the opinion: “The image leaves everything open and language constricts”. He mixed painting, object art, installation and performance photography and - influenced by the artistic zeitgeist of the 1960s - strove to open up traditional categories of work across borders in order 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)