Franz Jenull: Painting 1980-2016

Between Venice, Innsbruck and Florence, the Austrian painter Franz Jenull (1949-2017) developed - after his studies with Emilio Vedova at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice - in many layers of paint and overpainting, 'sharpenings' as he calls them, and in an interplay of spontaneity and control, a non-figurative painting that combines color and form to create a poetic density that is also musical in its rhythm, thus opening up completely new pictorial spaces.His artistic work, developed dialectically between figurative and abstract from 1980 onwards, is one of the passages. He dissolves the dichotomy between figuration and abstraction that has been carried on since the modernity and, according to Gilles Deleuze, leads it into the 'figural'. The anatomical figure remains the focus of his interest and stands at the beginning of each of his paintings.160 illustrations, divided into four groups of works, provide the first overview of and insight into the artist's solitary pictorial work. The three phases of his work become visible, from the informal paintings at the very beginning, to the 'color bar paintings' at the beginning of the 1990s, to the 'all over painting' of his late work.