Hubert Schmalix

Hubert Schmalix is a visual artist who is numbered among the most prominent Austrian painters. Along with Gunter Damisch, Herbert Brandl and Erwin Bohatsch, Schmalix belongs to the group called the Wild Youth.

Schmalix studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts from 1971 to 1976, where he was taught by Max Melcher. His career took off shortly after he graduated, with his first individual exhibition at Künstlerhaus Wien the same year. Works by Schmalix featured at the Aktuell 83 exhibition in Munich in 1983. International success followed soon afterwards: he went to Sydney in 1984, where the city’s Biennale provided the ideal framework to present his art to a wider audience. Aside from Los Angeles, the artist continues to live for extended periods in Australia. He took part in the Venice Biennale in 1993, and he was appointed professor at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts four years later.

His artistic oeuvre cannot be assigned to a particular stylistic category, as his work has been in a constant state of flux over the decades. An expressionist intensity of colour dominated his pieces in the 1970s especially. He joined the Wild Youth during the 1980s, a group that focused in particular on the medium of painting. Female nudes featured largely in his art from the mid-1980s, after he married a woman from the Philippines. Inspired by West Coast painting, he produced works depicting Christ and city views during the 1990s.

Among his most famous works is the design for St. Paul’s in Salzburg.

Hubert Schmalix remains an extremely busy artist, whose works are exhibited in numerous international museums and are regularly included in auctions.

Source: www.dorotheum.com