Josef Mikl

"The anatomically thought drawing thinks from the inside out." With this statement, Josef Mikl clarified his abstract ambition in painting and drawing, without excluding the figurative from his world of forms. It is a perceived figuration and not a seen, pictured one from visible reality. First is the free artistic expression, the brushstroke, non-objective in its essence, autonomous, but clamped in a matrix of elementary figurative. Hatches form surfaces of a painting body, self-sufficient, filled with painterly means. "Untitled", 1962 originates from a working phase with predominant agitated dynamic gesture, taken in a formal system of upright figure. This figure shows consistently approaches to sculptural cubist formulations, such as Fritz Wotruba. Also Mikl has created few cubic tubular objects of anthropomorphic-mechanical. The present painting marks a golden age of Austrian Informel, as the most important artistic contribution to the postwar period. Mikl and his colleagues of the „Nächst St. Stephan-Gruppe“, as well as other artists, joined quickly the international avant-garde of abstract expressionism and created a fertile scene for local art.