Welcome to dextri.com on July 6 2009.
This is an internet experiment running to monitor browsing habbits of individuals through wikipedia contents.

Friedensreich Hundertwasser

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
 This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2009)
Friedensreich Hundertwasser

Hundertwasser in New Zealand in 1998
Birth name Friedrich Stowasser
Born December 15, 1928(1928-12-15)
Vienna, Austria
Died 19 February 2000 (aged 71)
Nationality Austrian
Field Art, sculpture, architecture

Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser, born Friedrich Stowasser, (December 15, 1928 – February 19, 2000) was an Austrian painter, architect and sculptor.

Born in Vienna, he became one of the best-known contemporary Austrian artists, although controversial, by the end of the 20th century.

Contents

[edit] Childhood and personal life

Hundertwasser's father Ernst Stowasser died three months after his son's first birthday. The war was a particularly hard time for Hundertwasser and his mother Elsa, as she was Jewish. The two avoided persecution by posing as Catholics, a credible ruse because Hundertwasser's father had been a Catholic. In order to remain inconspicuous, Hundertwasser joined the Hitler Youth.[1]

After the war, he spent three months in a Viennese art school. At this time he began to sign his art as Hundert instead of Stowasser. He left to travel, using a small set of paints he carried at all times to sketch anything that caught his eye. He had his first commercial painting success in 1952-3 with an exhibition in Vienna. It wasn't until 1981 that he designed his first building.

Hundertwasser married Herta Leitner in 1958 but they divorced two years later. He married again in 1962 but was divorced by 1966.

[edit] Characteristics of Hundertwasser

Typical Hundertwasser facade in Plochingen

Hundertwasser's original and unruly artistic vision expressed itself in pictorial art, environmentalism, philosophy, and design of facades, postage stamps, flags, and clothing (among other areas). The common themes in his work utilised bright colours, organic forms, a reconciliation of humans with nature, and a strong individualism, rejecting straight lines.

His art life began when he was at Vienna, he became fascinated with the work of Egon Schiele and so unknowingly his art life began.

He remains sui generis, although his architectural work is comparable to Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926) in its biomorphic forms and use of tile. He was also inspired by the Austrian of the Vienna Art Nouveau (Vienna Secession) movement's traditions, and by the Austrian painters Egon Schiele (1890–1918) and Gustav Klimt (1862-1918).

He was fascinated with spirals, and called straight lines "the devil's tools". He called his theory of art "transautomatism", based on Surrealist automatism, but focusing on the experience of the viewer, rather than the artist.

Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna

Although Hundertwasser first achieved notoriety for his boldly-coloured paintings, he is more widely renowned today for his revolutionary architectural designs, which incorporate natural features of the landscape, and use of irregular forms in his building design. The Hundertwasserhaus block in Vienna features undulating floors ("an uneven floor is a melody to the feet"), a roof covered with earth and grass, and large trees growing from inside the rooms, with limbs extending from windows. He took no payment for the design of Hundertwasserhaus, declaring that it was worth it, to "prevent something ugly from going up in its place".

He felt that standard architecture could not be called art, and declared that the design of any building should be influenced by the aesthetics of its eventual tenants. Hundertwasser was also known for his performance art, in which he would, for instance, appear in public in the nude promoting an ecologically friendly flush-less toilet.

Incinerator works in Vienna

On July 4, 1958 he read his celebrated and controversial Verschimmelungs-Manifest, the so-called Mould Manifesto against rationalism in architecture, in the abbey of Seckau. "A person in a rented apartment must be able to lean out of his window and scrape off the masonry within arm's reach. And he must be allowed to take a long brush and paint everything outside within arm's reach. So that it will be visible from afar to everyone in the street that someone lives there who is different from the imprisoned, enslaved, standardised man who lives next door." In 1972 he published the manifesto Your window right — your tree duty: planting trees in an urban environment was to become obligatory: "If man walks in nature's midst, then he is nature's guest and must learn to behave as a well-brought-up guest."

[edit] Personal details and legacy

Hundertwasser (left) 1965 in Hannover

His adopted surname is based on the translation of Sto (the Slavic word for "one hundred") into German. The name Friedensreich has a double meaning as "Peaceland" or "Peacerich" (in the sense of "peaceful"). The other names he chose for himself, Regentag and Dunkelbunt, translate to "Rainy day" and "Darkly multicoloured". His name Friedensreich Hundertwasser means, "Peace-Kingdom Hundred-Water".

Hundertwasser considered New Zealand as his official home, and no matter where he went in the world, his watch was always set to New Zealand time. That finally became the place he was buried after his death at sea on the RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 in 2000, at the age of 71.[1]

His work has been used for flags, stamps, coins, posters, schools, churches, a public toilet in Kawakawa in his adopted home of New Zealand, and apartment buildings. His most famous flag is the Koru Flag; he has also designed stamps for the Cape Verde islands and for the United Nations post administration in Geneva on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In 1999 he started his last project named Die Grüne Zitadelle von Magdeburg. Although he never finished this work completely, the building was put up a few years later in Magdeburg, a town in central Germany, and finally opened on October 3, 2005.

An art gallery featuring his work will be established in a council building in Whangarei, New Zealand, and will bring to fruition his 1993 plans for improving the building.[2] He believed that architects should be inspired by, or include nature in their work.

[edit] Buildings

[edit] Selected works

Kunsthaus in Vienna

Grüne Zitadelle in Magdeburg, Germany

Quixote Winery in Napa Valley

Hundertwasser facade in Plochingen

House in Waldspirale

Hundertwasserhaus, the bathroom in Vienna

Thermal power plant in Vienna

Residential building at Bad Soden am Taunus (suburban Frankfurt, Germany)
Hot springs, Bad Blumau (Austria)
Hot springs, Bad Blumau (Austria)

[edit] References and sources

Notes
  1. ^ a b Pawley, Martin. Friedensreich Hundertwasser - Maverick architect building against the grain (obituary), The Guardian, 14 April 2000. Retrieved 1 June 2009.
  2. ^ Tony Gee, New gallery to show artist's work, New Zealand Herald, 25 February 2008.
  3. ^ Hundertwasser design, Quixote Winery. Retrieved 3 June 2008.
  4. ^ Hundertwasser toilets, Far North District Council. Updated 9 December 2008. Retrieved 3 June 2008.
Sources

[edit] External links

Sister project Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Friedensreich Hundertwasser
Sister project Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Friedensreich Hundertwasser

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedensreich_Hundertwasser"
Personal tools
Visit joltnews for the latest headlines
Visit bloit.com for company information
Geed Media does computer consulting on long island.
This page viewed times. See Logs