Zerbrochene Sonne

He made a name for himself not only as a visual artist, but also as a musician, writer, object maker, designer, stage designer and filmmaker. Above all, however, Attersee is regarded as one of the most important representatives of representational painting in Europe in the last 50 years; he is a maverick in almost all areas of the visual arts. He spent his youth in Aschach near Linz and on Lake Attersee in Upper Austria, he was one of Austria's great sailing sportsmen - hence the pseudonym Attersee. His first exhibitions from the mid-1960s brought success, as did his friendships and collaborations with artists such as Günter Brus, Gotthard Graubner, Jörg Immendorff, Markus Lüpertz, Hermann Nitsch, Walter Pichler, Dieter Roth, Gerhard Rühm, Oswald Wiener and others. Since Attersee's first object inventions (1964-66) in the field of eroticism and everyday life, he has been regarded as an independent co-determiner of European Pop Art. Attersee is the great maverick of Austrian art in the 1960s, the antithesis of Viennese Actionism. In the second half of the 1970s, Attersee was the founding figure of "New Austrian Painting".