Jakob Kirchmayr

Born into the third generation of a family of artists in 1975, Jakob Kirchmayr explored the fields of drawing before developing his own style and unique expression as a painter. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, he established his own studio in the fourth district, a melting pot of the city‘s fine art galleries, artists and the creative scene of the city.

Starting out with figurative painting in his earlier work, Jakob Kirchmayr reveals an astonishing understanding of the human condition. Major shifts and transformations in his life, induced a radical change in his approach and his style boldly evolved towards abstraction and a new freedom of expression in recent years. Inspired by lyrical texts, his visually compelling compositions are filled with layers of meaning. Handwritten quotes appear like hidden messages in his art, inviting the audience to discover them at a second glance.

Using landscape as a source of inspiration, Kirchmayr‘s latest work is mostly liberated from an obvious subject. The artist doesn’t just use landscapes as metaphors for and projections of his own experiences, his various topographies are portraits of collective memories that evoke an emotional response in the viewer. Kirchmayr's sensibility towards the haptic quality of his materials becomes apparent in his monumental works on paper and canvas. Building layer upon layer of colour and texture, Kirchmayr rejects working with preliminary sketches. Thus, his paintings are filled with the strongest vitality, as the artist follows his impulses with a dynamic and spontaneous way of painting. The secret to the brilliance and lucidity of colours lies in his choice of purest pigments and a special technique, developed by the artist through years of experimenting.

Choosing French cotton paper of the highest quality, Kirchmayr allows his paintings to bend and build waves under the weight and humidity of ink, pigment, gesso and acrylic, adding a further dimension to his art. Instead of being pressed and straightened out, his papers arefilled with their own life and an astonishing presence.Emphasizing the contrast of the fragility of his works with theirapparent solidity, Jakob Kirchmayr creates handmade frames of natural oak without glass. In that way, no barrier exists between the work and the viewer. Thus, a sense of immediacy and three-dimensionality is conveyed. Jakob Kirchmayr‘s work has been exhibited in major solo and group exhibitions in Austria and Europe. He has also been shown at art fairs both in Europe and the USA in collaboration with the Galerie Ernst Hilger, among others. The artist lives and works in Vienna, Austria.