Josef Nöbauer
At the beginning of Josef Nöbauer’s artistic oeuvre stands the iconic-contradictory title of a picture from the year 1969: “Jesus – du sollst dir kein Bild Machen” [Jesus – You shall not make for yourself a picture]. The picture, however,—and the highly specific drawing method developed by Nöbauer to create it, and one could say, practiced by him with utter passion until today—is exactly what is at the center of his art. At the same time, Nöbauer has always been a sculpturally thinking and practicing artist from his earliest beginnings, and for him it is an exciting and productive challenge to work on
and over the conceptual opposition between the two categories of picture and sculpture. What principally characterizes his work is a maximum of aesthetic condensation, in which philosophical-artistic seriousness and fine humor merge with technical accuracy. Nöbauer’s first works are characterized by the optimistic spirit of the 1968ers. They are actionistic and provocatively deal with general social discipline and religious conventions, which was also possible in the context of a liberal strain of ecclesiastical art policy of this time. Up to today, the largest part of Nöbauer’s work is taken up by the “Portraits,” which he began in 1978. They show people from Nöbauer’s personal surroundings, friends, family members, and acquaintances. The opus magnum among the portraits is “Mikhail Gorbachev – A Portrait Drawing” (1993), a work as tall as a hall, which, politically highly topical, was first exhibited in Vienna. Nöbauer came up with some clever things for the President of the USSR, who resigned in 1991—especially when looking back to a political geography better known as the “Former West” and the “Former East”: the well-known reddish port-wine stain on Gorbachev’s forehead, for instance, takes on the form of the map outline of Western Europe, while it appears as if Eastern Europe’s political sphere of power does not exist, except for the Crimea, which lies as a tiny green island in the “no man’s land” of the politician’s high forehead; reunified Germany, in return, was coated with gold leaf. S.E.
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