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1927 Pfaffenberg/Carinthia – 2015 Vienna
- Title
- “Farmhouse in Waldviertel/Lower Austria”
- Time
- 1980
- signed
- verso “F. G. 1980”
- Technique
- oil on canvas
- Measurements
- 70 ¾×103 ½ in
Franz Grabmayr discovered the place his soul felt most at home – the Waldviertel district in Lower Austria – in 1964, right after receiving his diploma from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He spent the first summers in the empty Rosenau Castle, then in 1973 he moved into an old traditional farmhouse near the town of Zwettl. This resulted in vast landscape paintings featuring the power of nature, painted en plein air, intuitive, pastose, overflowing with the creative energy of the painter.
Grabmayr created this monumental painting in question at the same time as one of his most important assignments – a 50 meter-long frieze (consisting of 20 oil paintings) for the newly constructed headquarters of the Pension Insurance Institution in Vienna. This large-format view with an expressively pastose color application shows a windswept landscape beneath a marvelous summer sky. At the center of the composition is a farmhouse nestled between fields and meadows – a declaration of love transformed into a painting by Franz Grabmayr, dedicated to the austere beauty of country life. This masterful painting was once the principal attraction of the Grabmayr solo exhibition at the Museum Angerlehner.
illustrated in: R. Fleck/C. Wiesauer: Franz Grabmayr. Feuerbilder. Tanzblätter. Materialbilder (exhibition cat. Museum Angerlehner, March 11 – Sept. 24, 2017), Cologne 2017, p. 84/85.