Arik Brauer

Arik Brauer was born in Vienna on January 4, 1929. From 1945 to 1951, he studied painting at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts with Robin Christian Andersen and Albert Paris Gütersloh. Brauer, along with his academy colleagues Ernst Fuchs, Rudolf Hausner, Wolfgang Hutter and Anton Lehmden, was the main representative and co-founder of the "Vienna School of Fantastic Realism", a movement in Austrian art history that was close to surrealism and was founded in 1959. The group trained in painting using the techniques of the old masters, such as Pieter Brueghel and Hieronymus Bosch. The painters frequented to the Art Club, a post-war Vienna artists' association that was founded in 1947. In 1959 the first joint exhibition of the phantastic realists took place in the Austrian Belvedere Gallery, which was followed by an unprecedented series of successful international exhibitions from Germany to Japan. At a young age, Arik Brauer financed his travels through Europe, Israel and the Orient through appearances as a singer. He received numerous orders for stage sets at international opera houses such as Zurich, Vienna and Paris. At the same time, he had success as a singer with numerous recordings. From 1985 to 1997, Arik Brauer was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. From 1988 to 1995, he dealt with the planning and execution of an artistically inspired apartment building in the Gumpendorferstrasse in Vienna's 6th district. The artist lives and works in Vienna and in En Hod, Israel.