Gunter Damisch
Born in Steyr in 1958 he attended school in Linz and studied medicine, German literature and history before discovering painting
Letters from Vienna #23
In 2016 I saw Gunter Damisch for the last time; he was a man lost to the world. Not long afterwards he was dead from cancer. I was shocked and saddened not least because I was obsessively, passionately and selfishly in love with his work; thankfully it survives him. His “dancing” paintings, a “massage for the nerves”, were usually made up of playful, joyful and colourful elements inspired by nature, a common source for a lot of Austrian artists: Kocherscheidt, Bohatsch, Brandl (who has campaigned to preserve the environment, especially the river Sulm in Styria) and Zitko to name but a few.
Born in Steyr (a town in Upper Austria) in 1958 he attended school in Linz and studied medicine, German literature and history before discovering painting, a choice of profession that shocked his parents, both of whom were dentists.
In 1977 he was accepted by the Academy in Vienna, studied under Max Melcher and Arnulf Rainer and, in 1982, a year before actually graduating, had his first exhibition in Galerie Ariadne.
In the 1980s he benefited enormously from being part of the “Neue Wilde”, essentially a wave of artists who reasserted the primacy of painting, which included Otto Zitko, Herbert Brandl and Hubert Scheibl in Austria and Markus Lüpertz, Martin Kippenberger and Markus Oehlen in Germany.