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Born in 1923 in St. Urban, Kärnten, Hans Staudacher is the most important Austrian representative of Lettrism. This literary and artistic movement was founded in Paris in 1945 and promotes the exploration of literature in painting. Texts are broken down into their basic components; sentences become words or individual letters.
Written elements are recognizable in most of Hans Staudacher’s works. In some cases, entire poems are incorporated into his works; in others, individual words, short sentences, or even numbers appear. These forms are brought into sharp relief by the mostly monotonous background. In this painting, yellow, red, and black accents are set against a light- to dark-blue background. In the center of the canvas, there is a cluster of symbols and areas of color. The outer lightness becomes denser and more structured toward the center.
The artist lived in Paris from 1954 to 1962, where he engaged intensively with Lettrism and lyrical Informel. The artist developed his own, informal lyrical visual language. The painting process is very spontaneous: for large-scale color accents, he pours the paint directly onto the canvas; the fine linear elements are applied directly to the picture surface from the paint tube. In the 1980s, the period in which this work was created, the artist’s painting style became more fluid, and the paintings exuded a certain freshness due to their reduced painterly and textual density. The individual symbols can no longer be clearly identified. The written elements become difficult to read in this phase and are drawn with expressive, sweeping lines.
Hans Staudacher’s artistic work earned him the privilege of representing Austria at a Biennale on three occasions. Following his appearances in Venice in 1956 and in Tokyo in 1965—where he also won the grand prize—he achieved his international breakthrough. As was typical of the Informel movement, however, the artist also questioned the dynamics of the art market. He expresses this in many of his paintings through the oversized scale of his signature.