“Retrospective Alfred Klinkan'” / Neue Galerie Graz

Wilfried Skreiner, at the time Director of the Neue Galerie, defined a group of young artists in the early 1980s, Siegfried Anzinger, Hubert Schmalix, Alois Mosbacher, Josef Kern, Erwin Bohatsch and Alfred Klinkan, whose art he described as “New Painting”. The sensuous-narrative painting experience of this generation was seen as a counter-force to Conceptual Art, which was perceived as inimical to the object and exclusively based on the idea of the artwork.

Alfred Klinkan died around 25 years ago; in 2020 he would have been 70 years old. He was a pioneer of the “New Painting” movement in Austria, of which he was subsequently a key exponent. In the early 1970s he studied in Vienna at the Academy of Fine Arts under Josef Mikl and Wolfgang Hollegha, focusing on painting, which in times of Performance, Conceptual and the incipient Media Art already seemed anachronistic.

The provocative undertone of his early works, in surprising contrast to the apparent naivety of his pictorial language, is explained by the imprint left by the dynamics of 1968, the year of protest. Klinkan concentrated such art trends as Viennese Actionism, the Wirklichkeiten, or Pop Art in general, into something anarchic, autonomous. The ambiguous naivety of his art and the humour associated with it were often transferred to real life, which Klinkan often saw as a story, a comic, or indeed a miracle. Long live Rock ’n’ Roll, long hair, warm beer, and the last ciggie!