HERMANN SERIENT (born 1935 in Melk), Vampires, 1969

HERMANN SERIENT*
(born 1935 in Melk)
Vampires, 1969
oil and egg tempera/wood, 24,4 x 25 cm
signed Serient and dated 1969
verso label Gallery Peithner Lichtenfels 1969, titled Vampire
Provenance: private property Vienna

ESTIMATE °€ 4.000 - 8.000
START € 3.500

Austrian artist of the 20th century. Lives and works in Vienna and southern Burgenland. Completed an apprenticeship as a goldsmith, lived in Vienna in the 1960s as an artist, cartoonist for the Wiener Arbeiterzeitung and jazz musician, and traveled through Europe by car stop. He experimented with homemade instruments, took photographs and made animated films for the ORF. From the 1970s, as a forerunner of the green movement, social and environmental themes in his work. Works in old master technique like the representatives of Magic Realism and the Viennese School of Fantastic Realism Ernst Fuchs, Arik Brauer, Rudolf Hausner and Wolfgang Hutter. Interest in works by Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Breughel. Grotesque, enigmatic, fairy-tale and mystical elements as in Surrealism. Themes and motifs always related to the present, social criticism and pointing out environmental destruction. Also comic and humorous elements as in the depictions of the vampire. Luminosity of colors by mixing the pigments, oil paints and egg tempera. 2005 and 2015 exhibitions at the Landesgalerie Burgenland in Eisenstadt.

When Hermann Serient, a young goldsmith and jazz musician from Melk, hitchhiked in the 1950s, financed by engagements as a trombonist and drummer, to see the art of the "old masters" up close in Europe's museums, he was particularly interested for the painting of Hieronymus Bosch or Bruegel, for the handling of the material by Dutch Renaissance painters. Like these, Seriet always uses his own paints, which he does not mix on the palette but applies to the picture support, preferably wood, in many thin layers until he achieves the desired color tone. In 1965, Serient moved to the south of Burgenland, where he completely relocated his life for a few years and where he still lives today. The archaic and hermetic world that he found in the villages of the "Heanzen" appeared to the city dweller Serient as completely new and incomprehensible; however, he quickly made friends personally. The fascination he felt in view of the primitive building forms, the different way of speaking and clothing in every village and last but not least the traditional festivals and rituals, which must have seemed mysterious and bizarre to the outsider, became a main source of inspiration for the artist and also found outside of his famous Heanzen -cycle their precipitation. Originally characterized by caricature and influenced by the expressionism of George Grosz or Alfred Kubin, the densely populated sceneries now showed clear parallels to his new role models Bosch and Bruegel. He was often pigeonholed with the Viennese artists of Fantastic Realism, which Serialt has always rejected. For him, art only has value if it has content and doesn't lose itself in random whimsicality. Thus, series not only took sides for the declining, independent culture of the Heanzen, but increasingly dealt with environmental issues and other political issues. The vampire, before whom the two much smaller men bow in awe, is a barely encoded warning against charlatanry, paternalism and exploitation. The profiteers of social inequality appear here as creepy bloodsuckers.

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