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Description
Hans Knesl*
(Bad Pirawarth 1905 – 1971 Vienna)
In the suburbs, 1956
watercolour and Indian ink on paper, 43 x 31 cm
signed Knesl, dated 56
ESTIMATE €300 – €500
STARTING PRICE €300
The Austrian artist Hans Knesl grew up in modest circumstances in Bad Pirawarth near Vienna. Following his mother’s early death, he spent much of his time lost in his own thoughts. His father arranged an apprenticeship for him in Lage (Lippe), where Hans Knesl trained as a stonemason from 1920 to 1924. He then studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna under Hans Bitterlich and graduated with a diploma in 1930. Knesl remained in Vienna as a freelance artist. Due to a lack of major commissions, he initially produced portraits, illustrated magazines (Wiener Magazin, 1940–1941) and designed models for the Metzler & Ortloff porcelain factory in Ilmenau, Thuringia. It was there that he met Elfriede Dietz, whom he married in 1936. Following the annexation, Hans Knesl’s professional situation deteriorated further because his style did not align with Nazi ideology and his work was classified as ‘degenerate’. Knesl was called up in 1941, but was discharged shortly before the end of the war on health grounds. After the war, Knesl earned his living carrying out restoration work on Vienna City Hall, the University of Vienna and Laxenburg Palace. He also returned to sculpture. In 1949 he became a member of the Vienna Künstlerhaus. In 1951 he became head of the masterclass in sculpture at the Academy of Applied Arts. Based on the teaching of technical skills, its aim was to support the students in their independent artistic development. Knesl spent his summers in the Waldviertel working with Mühldorf marble. Knesl’s ‘Big Standing One’, exhibited in Vienna’s City Park in 1954, caused a scandal and had to be removed; his ‘Standing Girl’ was badly damaged in 1956. In the final years of his life, Knesl turned to drawing and painting. His work was subsequently brought to the attention of a wider public through two major exhibitions in Vienna. For the last of these, in 1970, he created nine new sculptures in less than a year. Knesl’s works from the 1940s and 1950s are now regarded as classics of the archaising, de-individualising tendencies in figurative art. His plastic realism of the 1960s played a key role in establishing new, realistic movements. His artistic concerns centred primarily on the human figure, which was stylised differently during the various phases of his artistic development. Knesl remained committed to the idealised figure for a long time before finding a more realistic form around 1950. In the 1950s, he created figures with strong sculptural accents, which soon gave way to sculptures with a more pronounced tectonic structure. In the 1960s, these two artistic directions achieved a synthesis in his ‘Standing’ and ‘Striding’ works. Knesl always chose hard stones for his works, with as minimal a surface texture as possible so that the viewer’s eye was not distracted from the form. When Hans Knesl worked as a sculptor, his figures took shape by adding small particles of material in several layers, like an onion. He left the texture of the applied lumps of clay visible. Almost all of Hans Knesl’s sculptures are cast in concrete, initially for cost reasons. Other artists and styles: Hans Bitterlich, Alfred Hrdlicka, Wander Bertoni, Vienna Künstlerhaus, University of Applied Arts Vienna, modern sculpture, Cubism, plastic realism, figurative realism, concrete
PLEASE NOTE:
The purchase price comprises the highest bid plus the buyer’s premium, VAT and, where applicable, the artists’ resale rights fee and platform fee. In the case of standard taxation (marked °), a premium of 24% is added to the highest bid. The mandatory sales tax of 13 per cent (20 per cent for photographs) is added to the sum of the highest bid, the buyer’s premium and the platform fee.
The buyer’s premium amounts to 28 per cent in the case of differential taxation. The sales tax is included in the differential taxation.
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