In its summer exhibition, the galerie gugging presents the Gugging Artist Günther Schützenhöfer and gifts the master of abstraction and condensation with an extensive retrospective shortly before his 60th birthday. With his expressive, mostly black-and-white art, Schützenhöfer has created a world of his own that makes the hearts of art collectors from Maria Gugging to New York City beat faster. The artist’s oeuvre is classified as art brut, founded by Jean Dubuffet, and can be found in numerous private and public collections worldwide.
The Gugging Artist loves music and is a structured person, who appreciates and needs regular routines. This includes his drawing visits to the galerie gugging during opening hours, which have become a fixed point and until recently he preferred doing it together with the Gugging Artist Heinrich Reisenbauer, who passed away in February 2025. Here, the artist works on new works almost every day at 2 pm in the office of galerie gugging director Nina Katschnig. He only receives assistance with the regular sharpening of his pencils and coloured pencils. The direct, powerful way of pressing the pencil onto the paper has become his unique, unmistakable drawing style. Sometimes the work is even perforated by the intense strokes. This creates an unmistakable world that literally casts a spell over the viewer. While Schützenhöfer started out with a gentle stroke, his works have become increasingly dense over the years. galerie gugging director Nina Katschnig goes into raptures when she talks about his work:
“The different degrees of hardness of the pencils used often create very exciting, one-of-a-kind structures. Schützenhöfer’s signature is also unique, which, as with the Gugging Artist Johann Hauser, is not written but drawn.” In addition to his main drawing instrument, the pencil, he also adds accents with bold coloured pencils from time to time. Alejandra Russi and Frank Maresca from our New York partner gallery are also impressed by Schützenhöfer’s art:
“His drawings are minimal but magnetic – pared down to their essence and full of soul. They’re meditations more than renderings. He revisits objects over and over again: bicycles, combs, shoes, vases, balls. With each iteration, the line becomes more resolved, the shape more his own. The repetition is not redundant, it’s devotional. As if he’s trying to fully understand the object, to live inside it, before releasing it back into the world in his unique visual language.”
The artist’s works on display in our exhibition radical clarity impressively illustrate his transformation from the gentler early works around 2003 to his current, very dense works. A highlight of the exhibition is the Helicopter, one of the densest works from Schützenhöfer’s early creative period, the Eiffel Tower from 2016, a one-meter-tall Locomotive and the Radio, for which the artist used a radio receiver painted by the Gugging Artist Johann Garber from Nina Katschnig’s office as an inspiration.
