Don’t be afraid of girls and flowers – Diepresse.com
Hubert Schmalix has died a great painter of strange anti -images in which he conjured up his Elysium. Now he has been received at the age of 72.
He was an artist who was not afraid of flowers. Before female beauty. His male look. Before the stylization. Of the decoration. Or the personal. He took the phone to defend his truth. If the critic said, for example, that his students at the Vienna Academy of Fine Artswhere he taught from 1999 to 2006, were too close to the master. Then he had the critic dancing to confront her in front of the assembled class. Even if everyone stayed with his opinion that a conversation, a dialogue, was created. After all, it was about something. It was about painting.
Hubert Schmalix was all about painting. He was Austria’s Gauguin, he was looking for his Elysium in simple and in the stranger. Whether these were acting of his Filipino wife, his favorite model. Whether they were broken vases. Lush landscapes. Or flowers. Schmalix reduced these motifs until archaic, universal images were taken. With monochrome color areas, clear outline. Often they are compared to comics, but you could also think of the illustrations of these small Bible pixie booklets with which you grow up in Austria. Hubert Schmalix did that in Graz, where he was born in 1952. He died on Sunday after a long illness at the age of 72 in his adopted home Los Angeles.
In 1987, at the climax of his fast and early career, he had landed there and never really gone away. He was one of the « new wild ones », this loose, more defined by their joint socialization at the Vienna Art Academy, with the center of the Maximilian Melcher class. Siegfried Anzinger, Herbert Brandl, Hubert Scheibl and Hubert Schmalix, were called their stars. You painted expressively, color -strength, figurative or abstract, no matter, the main thing is painting and the main thing.
An abandoned king
Until the end, Schmalix mastered the monumental format, be it with digital motifs for the tarpaulins of the Pavilion of Styria, which can still be found on Heldenplatz. Or with its last oil paintings, which were just presented in the Linz Castle Museum: the large individual show was called « Tremor », which also dealt with age and illness; Schmalix transferred it to simple, comic figures like everything else, played with the topos of the bearded old man in the older and recent art history. « Whe » is one of the pictures, it shows a king in a blue dress and with a crown, laid out in the lower picture.
« /> Hubert Schmalix, « Whe », 2022, oil on canvas, 245 x 500 cm Narrowix
Schmalix was also still present in Graz, and in 2023 it was only seen in the new gallery his recent landscapes. He was not a landscape painter, he once said, but he painted landscapes. Which means so much that he did not reproduce real, but his inner. The big fame, however, was flattened. The large retrospectives took place in the BA Kunstforum 2025. In 1994 a much -noticed man in the museum of modern art, still in the Palais Liechtenstein at the time. Even if the politically correct zeitgeist sometimes harshly put on him, as he does with Gauguin. He will pass by. Also on these strange anti -images with which Hubert Schmalix has painted himself into the Austrian art history of the post -war period.
