AUSTRIAN ART does not, on the whole, have a high profile internationally, though that may be viewing it from our own special angle from out West. Austrian artists are, in fact, quite often seen in Venice, Germany etc, but less so on the Anglo-American circuit, to the edge of which, like it or not, we in Ireland largely belong. And Austria, for centuries, has drawn on its proximity to Eastern Europe, besides having the mellowing influence of Italy just over the Alps.
The exhibition in the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery goes back only to 1980 and sensibly avoids historicism, though this does not confine it to young or recently emerged artists only. There are in fact at least two generations represented, and since the exhibitors are limited to a single painting each, well over 40, people are included. The choice was made by Georg Eisler, a leading Austrian painter, and Kristian Sotriffer, a prominent Viennese critic who has written the thoughtful catalogue essay.
This is not a "thematic exhibition" in the modish sense, but it has been grouped imaginatively into four "elements": Figure-Bodies, Skin-shadows, Providence-Metamorphosis, and Elements "Flood of Images." The grouping is free rather than arbitrary, and there is no "programme"; it might be said, very approximately, that these titles correspond to key signatures in music.
My exposure to contemporary Austrian art has been limited, and what I have seen has left me with the impression of wide diversity rather than any obvious homogeneity. Georg Eisler, for instance, is a very special kind of realist-expressionist with a rich feeling for paint, while Arnulf Rainer - one of the names we do know - is close to Abstract Expressionism. And Hermann Nitsch, another man whose reputation has travelled here, is recognisably a freewheeling, almost aggressive abstractionist with roots in the 1960s.
There are frequent touches of the macabre (as you might expect from a country with a strong Baroque heritage) but it is "painterly" rather than literary-surreal. Wolfgang Herzig, for example, bears some relationship with Otto Dix and German Expressionism, yet the emotional temperature is different. Siegfried Anzinger (who has been seen in Documenta) paints in a colourful, yet veiled and suggestive figurative style. Maria Lassnig - who appears to be the senior artist present - paints figures of an almost brutal, yet poetic simplicity.
If I can risk a broad judgment it seems to me that many or most of the best pictures on view are lyrical, expressive and personal rather than formal or constructivist. Hubert Scheibl (faintly reminiscent of our own Charles Tyrrell), Erwin Bohatsch, Dieter Kleinpeter, Josef Mikl, Meina Schellander may have little in common stylistically, but they do share a common lyricism and a feeling of not forcing things to too strident a note or of using heavy paint surfaces. Whereas Franz Ringel, Christian Ludwig Attersee, Peter Bischof and Martha Jungwirth do step up the emotional - and chromatic - temperature, besides using paint more rawly and aggressively.
BUT then where to place the odd, individual, almost fungus-like colour of Walter Vopava? The triptych of Johanes Zechner holds a thoughtful balance between neatness of form and personal fantasy, while Tone Fink's abstract style is at once formal and full of surface interest and incident, even wit. Elizabeth Plank (born 1960) is one of the most interesting of the recent generation. It seems to me also that an element which keeps breaking through is a feeling for nature, or nature-derived lyricism, though there is very little approximating to landscape in the traditional sense.
The fact that the painters have been limited to less-than-large works is a vote for democracy, though it could be argued that certain people (for instance, Kleinpeter, whose larger canvases I have seen in Vienna) rather lose out by this. The hanging, wisely, is sparse and allows the works a certain, necessary space to breathe and speak on a one-for-one basis.
