Home Artcollection » Artists » Ernst Zdrahal
After training at the Grafische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt Wien, Ernst Zdrahal (Vienna 1944) initially worked as a lithographer and commercial artist, but from the early 1970s as a freelance artist. As a painter, graphic artist and illustrator, Ernst Zdrahal developed a very individual formal language. In his works he unhierarchically combines different techniques and materials onto one base. This is also the case in the present works Dolomitenprojekt I and Schnittmusterlandschaftsprojekt, which were created on cardboard. From old maps, plans, cutting patterns, and floor plans that Zdrahal found at flea markets, in magazines, and in books, he cuts out individual parts and collages them into a pictorial composition. The conglomerate of fragments is subsequently supplemented both graphically and painterly. Ernst Zdrahal uses oil paint, Lumocolor drawings, and oil-printing inks and adds a wide variety of drawn hatchings, shapes, and building fragments to the painted surfaces, which function both as figurative, gestural elements, but also as demarcation and contour within a composition. Architecture and landscape meet in Zdrahal's work, as do creativity and technology.
