Friedensreich Hundertwasser

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Image:Magdeburg Hundertwasserhaus.jpg Friedensreich Hundertwasser (December 15 1928 – February 19 2000) was an Austrian painter and sculptor. By the end of the 20th century, he was arguably the best-known living artist in Austria, though he was always controversial.

He was born Friedrich Stowasser to a Jewish family in Vienna and attended the Montessori school in 1936. Before he was twenty, all of his relatives on his mother's side died in the Holocaust. He briefly attended the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1948 and began producing his own works in the late 1940s.

Hundertwasser's original, unruly, sometimes shocking artistic vision expressed itself in pictorial art, environmentalism, philosophy, and design of facades, postage stamps, flags, and clothing (among other areas). The common themes in his work are a rejection of the straight line, bright colours, organic forms, a reconciliation of humans with nature, and a strong individualism. He remains sui generis, although his architectural work is comparable to Antoni Gaudi in its biomorphic forms and use of tile. He was inspired by the works of Egon Schiele from an early date, and his style was often compared to that of Gustav Klimt. He was fascinated with spirals, and called straight lines "the devil's tools". He called his theory of art "transautomatism", based on Surrealist automatism, but focusing on the experience of the viewer, rather than the artist.

His adopted surname is based on the translation of "Sto" (the Czech word for "hundred") into German. The name "Friedensreich" has a double meaning as "Peaceland" or "Peacerich" (in the sense of 'peaceful'). The other names he chose for himself, "Regentag" and "Dunkelbunt", translate to "Rainy day" and "Dark, multicoloured". His name "Friedensreich Hundertwasser" means, "Peace-Kingdom Hundred-Water".

Although Hundertwasser first achieved notoriety for his boldly-coloured paintings, he is more widely renowned today for his revolutionary architectural designs, which incorporate natural features of the landscape, and use of irregular forms in his building design. Hundertwasserhaus, a low-income apartment block in Vienna, features undulating floors ("an uneven floor is a melody to the feet"), a roof covered with earth and grass, and large trees growing from inside the rooms, with limbs extending from windows. He took no payment for the design of Hundertwasserhaus, declaring that it was worth it, to "prevent something ugly from going up in its place".

Image:Hundertwasser-darmstadt front 750px.jpg

He felt that standard architecture could not be called art, and declared that the design of any building should be influenced by the aesthetics of its eventual tenants. Hundertwasser was also known for his performance art, in which he would, for instance, appear in public in the nude promoting an ecologically friendly flush-less toilet.

In 1972 he published the manifesto Your window right - your tree duty: "A person in a rented apartment must be able to lean out of his window and scrape off the masonry within arm's reach. And he must be allowed to take a long brush and paint everything outside within arm's reach. So that it will be visible from afar to everyone in the street that someone lives there who is different from the imprisoned, enslaved, standardised man who lives next door." Also planting trees in an urban environments was to become obligatory: "If man walks in nature's midst, then he is nature's guest and must learn to behave as a well-brought-up guest."

Image:Vena 19.jpg His work has been used for flags, stamps, coins, posters, schools, churches, a rest area in his adopted home of New Zealand, and apartment buildings. His most famous flag is the Koru Flag; he has also designed stamps for the Cape Verde islands and for the UN post administration in Geneva on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Hundertwasser always considered New Zealand as his official home, and no matter where he went in the world, his watch was always set to New Zealand time. That finally became the place he was buried after his death at sea in 2000.

In 1999 he started his last project named "Die Grüne Zitadelle von Magdeburg". Although he never finished this work completely, the building was put up a few years later in Magdeburg, a town in central Germany, and finally opened on October 3rd, 2005. (German Wikipedia: Hundertwasserhaus)

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