JAKOB GASTEIGER
Jakob Gasteiger (b. 1953, Salzburg, Austria) is an Austrian painter who lives and works in Vienna and Lower Austria. He is recognised as a central figure in the development of post-radical and analytical painting in Europe. Emerging in the late 1970s, Gasteiger’s practice developed in opposition to the resurgence of expressive painting in Austria. Instead, he established a reduced and systematic approach grounded in the material and structural conditions of painting itself. His work rejects representation and narrative, focusing on process, surface, and repetition as primary means of articulation.
Since the early 1980s, Gasteiger has employed a self-designed comb-like tool to structure the surface of his paintings. Drawn through layers of wet paint, this process produces dense, rhythmic fields in which repetition replaces gesture and composition emerges through accumulation rather than depiction. The resulting works, often monochrome, occupy a position between painting and relief, emphasising their physical and spatial presence. Central to this method is the deliberate removal of expressive authorship. By adopting a controlled, mechanical procedure, Gasteiger distances the work from subjective gesture, allowing the painting to develop through a consistent system of actions. In many works, he incorporates industrial materials—including metal powders and mineral substances—further reinforcing the object-like character of the surface and its relationship to light and reflection. Gasteiger’s practice is defined by a sustained commitment to reduction. His works do not depict external subjects; rather, they articulate the internal logic of painting through structure, density, and material presence. Subtle variations within repetition become the site of perception, requiring a mode of viewing attuned to duration and surface. Gasteiger’s work occupies a singular position within contemporary abstraction: a practice in which painting is understood not as image or expression, but as a continuous and disciplined investigation of its own material and structural conditions.
He has been the subject of major institutional exhibitions, including Jakob Gasteiger: Post Radical Painting at the Albertina, Vienna (2021), as well as retrospectives at the Salzburg Museum (2016) and the Museum der Moderne Salzburg (2002). His work is held in significant public collections, including the Albertina, Vienna; the Belvedere Museum; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Museum der Moderne Salzburg; the Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz; and the Museum Moderner Kunst Kärnten. Over the course of his career, Gasteiger has received several major awards, including the Anton Faistauer Prize for Painting (1990).
