A Viennese Splash in New York

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Last weekend Christian Ludwig Attersee drew a big crowd to O'Flaherty's. The legendary Austrian artist’s exuberant, large-scale paintings held their own against an eclectic and buzzy sea of young creatives, uptown and downtown gallerists, superfans, Attersee’s wife, and a documentary filmmaker from Germany who was filming the evening.

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“I'm very happy. It is a new start for me,” says Attersee inside “Snappy Armpits and More,” his long-overdue New York debut. “In Europe, I have had about 550 exhibitions, but in America I am just beginning,” the 83-year-old continues, pausing to survey the gallery’s packed hallway. He is taking a moment of reflection before he is again whisked away into the crowd. Behind him, a white wall is emblazoned with a black-line drawing of a bird with martini glasses as feet, one of three murals he hastily completed hours before the opening. 

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"I hope that the people here can understand my work,” Attersee muses. While the artist continuously cannibalizes his ideas to new and imaginative ends, his practice is grounded in a lexicon culled from the world around him: animals, natural landscapes, and his observations of modern life (consumerism, global warming, and Europe’s refugee crisis). “If you take those three elements and combine them, something new happens all the time,” he explains. “The birds and the fish are watching what the people are doing with the Earth. It is always critical.”

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In the East Village, far from Attersee’s home in Vienna—and a subway ride from his concurrent show at Galerie Gmurzynska uptown—a playful and provocative array of human body parts, fried eggs, fish, foliage, birds, and boats mingle on the walls. The prolific artist’s forms and figures are bent, broken, and botched. Frankensteined, technicolor symbols yield new, erotically charged interpretations of familiar images. Form triumphs over function, and hidden meanings lurk behind every brush stroke. “If you look at one of my paintings, you can discover something new every day,” he laughs.

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In one early mixed-media work, a colorful wolf with a fish hooked to its tongue protrudes from a woman’s bushy armpit. Elsewhere, a dachshund’s torso morphs into a ham shank. In the aptly titled Objekt Vagina, 1966, a hand-sized slit runs across a Pepto-Bismol pink box — made from wood, metal feathers, cellophane foil, and silk. 

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Works from the ‘80s and ‘90s are playfully cryptic and deviate further from their composites’ origins; like Diebin (Thief), 1989, where a gray, masculine, shark-like figure dives into a blue-and-yellow-gradient sea littered with fragmented, gestural shapes. Whereas paintings from the early aughts show Attersee’s universe filtered through a more pointed and painterly lens. In Milchausstellung (Milk Exhibition), 2004, a lone meat cleaver plunges into a sea of cobalt water. (The artist was a competitive sailor before picking up the paint brush, and he took his moniker from the Lake Attersee in Upper Austria where he grew up.) 

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The exhibition of paintings spanning 1965 to today (and the gallery’s first all-painting show) offers a comprehensive entry point into the mind of an idiosyncratic auteur who has created over 10,000 works to date that range from painting, music, writing, performance, sculpture, photography, collage, and film. Time and time again, he arrives at a fleeting and sensual rapture often framed or shaded by elements of discomfort and pain.

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In the aftermath of the violence and trauma of World War II, Attersee turned to the joy of pleasure and nature to express its inverse at the same time that the actionism movement confronted the carnage head-on with a mirror—two strikingly different approaches that captured the same cultural rift. 

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When the artist, who is now considered one of the leading figures in New Austrian Painting, came on the scene in post-war Europe, he was lightyears ahead of its time, recalls Ingried Brugger, the director of the Kunstforum Wien museum and Attersee’s wife. At a time when his peers were concerned with national identity, Attersee’s style veered individual and international. “He brought Pop Art elements and elements of the Surrealists and put it together,” says Brugger. “He invented a completely new world.”

“Christian Ludwig Attersee: Snappy Armpits and More” is on view at O’Flaherty’s at 44 Avenue A, New York, NY through January 15, 2024.

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