Walter Vopava

Walter Vopava is one of the most important contemporary representatives of abstract painting in Austria and is known for his painterly and at the same time individual and puristic colour compositions.

From his very beginnings, Walter Vopava was interested in the more quiet and existential side of painting. Vopava rejects all glamour and pomp. His aim has never been to focus on the absolute depiction of reality. Instead, he wants to transform or crystallise something out of the pretence of reality.

In his works from 2000 onwards, Vopava is primarily concerned with the construction of pictorial space, whereby he counteracts any homogeneous three-dimensionality and avoids any association with the figurative. For the most part, Vopava chooses the portrait format for his works, sometimes monumental in size, and thus also avoids the conceptual link to landscape and horizon.

He was awarded the Austrian State Prize for Art in 2011 and is a member of the MAERZ Artists’ Association and the Association of Austrian Visual Artists. His works have been presented at the Wiener Secession (1994), the Shanghai Art Museum (2005), the Kunsthalle Krems (2011) and the Mumok (2011).

Walter Vopava was born in 1948 in Vienna, Austria and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

He lives and works in Vienna and Berlin.