Josef Hirthammer

21.03.2019

The process of painting means and integrates sensual documenting spontaneity, momentum and conscious randomness; the color as a poetic trace.

An essential area of the creative art work of Josef Hirthammer are the non-objective color paintings. Here it is about the sensitive dissolution of the two-dimensional pictorial space. Isolated spots of color rise from the flat picture plane and strive into space. The third dimension is touched, the designed color surface becomes partially plastic.

Josef Hirthammer works in front of, behind and through the canvas. What is worked on from behind becomes visible plasticity in front. Found color parts are integrated into the two-dimensional color surfaces. This cognitive pictorial design remains exclusively in the non-representational realm. Only the composition, the color and its partly plastic striving may work.

The latest abstract works dissolve the parallel existence of photography, painting and digital design and are now manifested as a general innovation in art. The respective, until then independent techniques are inseparably blended and result in a novel stylistic device in design. These three design possibilities merge into an inseparable unity. Josef Hirthammer calls this technique fusionism.

Digital design on the computer offers almost infinite creativity. Only color and form play the leading role in the design. Only a little coincidence is allowed to play a role. The starting point of digital design is often a photograph of a canvas painted years ago.

Josef Hirthammer has been documenting the great cycle of contemporaries with his portraits for more than three decades. He consciously captures these person portrayals of the current appearance of his fellow human beings as a concise document of the times. Beauty and youth mania are as contemporary phenomena primary characteristics of his contemporaries.

Sylvia Weber, Head of the Würth Museum Group

07.01.2019

Josef Hirthammer (*1951 in Bad Reichenhall) is considered a versatile artist of our time. A major creative field is dedicated to nature, which he explores in diverse artistic formulations. What initially began in almost realistic rendering, very soon led to an abstraction of the plant originals. The fleeting, rapid application of color is the logical conclusion to capture the ephemeral beauty of flowers as a reduced idea that can be grasped with all the senses.

A counterpart to this are the wax works that archive real plants. The natural process of change is interrupted by embedding the flowers in wax and the momentary state is preserved in an artificially created aesthetic.

The wax objects, which the artist calls blue pieces of happy nature, are for him visual objects that likewise stand for the preservation of biodiversity. Sculpturally, nature also plays a major role in Hirthammer's work. In the exhibition, for example, there are oversized seed pods that are arranged as seeds of evolution to form room-filling installations. Another variation is formed by the fossilized mutants, which can be understood as a critical confrontation with the increasingly technically subjugated and genetically manipulated nature.

From first artistic steps to JOSATI

16.09.2018

The first artistic steps // Josef Hirthammer was born in Bad Reichenhall in 1951. His family had built up a small food production business in the post-war years. In a purely economically oriented parental home, he had no contact with art. At the age of 16 he met the painter Hermann Ober - her father - through a classmate. He was immediately fascinated by this personality and his art. During frequent visits to his studio at the Salzburg Kunstverein, Josef Hirthammer made his first prints in the technique of linocut. Soon he wandered through all the studios and thus became acquainted with the most diverse art movements of the time. After graduating from high school and completing his military service, he moved to Munich as a young married man to study art.

The years of study // During his studies he got to know and love the works of the painters Ernst Fuchs, Karl Korab and Friedrich Meckseper and created numerous small paintings and intaglio prints in their technique and representation. The paintings of Horst Janssen exerted a further fascination on the student Hirthammer. He himself developed a representation of his paintings combined from all facets of these models. As his favorite compositional feature, he often used the series. First exhibitions in small galleries in Munich enabled him to finance his studies without any problems. While still a student, Josef Hirthammer founded a gallery with a good friend, but it was closed after a short time because its co-owner was heavily in debt and wanted to burden him with it. By court order, he got out of this business relationship without much damage.

The artist group Zeichen // At the end of the 1970s, Hirthammer created numerous objects with found materials. At that time, he described himself as a "trace seeker." Together with Karol Hurec, Klaus Neuper and Jürgen Schehak he founded the group Zeichen in 1980. For a few years they worked intensively together, made several exhibitions, which, however, remained relatively unsuccessful. In 1978 Josef Hirthammer begins to deal intensively with the everyday object tea bag. As a result, a variety of objects and sculptures are created with this disposable object. Delicate drawings of objects formed with many tea bags strung together to oversized tea bags made of copper were exhibited at the legendary Gallery Studio F in Stuttgart. Installations and object boxes with a wide variety of found objects were created during these few years.

Basel and his contemporaries // In 1982 Josef Hirthammer made a radical break in his art. From then on he dealt with his contemporaries. Large-format paintings and wax crayon drawings were always created with the motif of man. With portraits of "cool" women and men, as they were to be found in typical in-scenes in every big city, he daringly documented the zeitgeist of those years with just a few brushstrokes. In the following years his name became a synonym for time-critical, figurative and striking paintings of his fellow men. Undoubtedly, for the artist it was both a reappraisal and a persiflage of a society and way of life that was getting more and more out of hand. His paintings and drawings were presented for years as a one-man show at Art Basel and made him a sought-after young artist of his time. During these years he met the Swiss gallery owner, curator and collector Jean Kämpf. This developed into a long-lasting intense friendship and a close economic collaboration.

Natural Pan-Sensualism // Also in the same year, Josef Hirthammer ideologically devoted himself to art with and in nature. First works of his now following art creation - the nature art - emerge. However, he did not go public with it until the beginning of the 1990s. In 1987 he developed his large-scale project Naturschach, an artistic formulation of the global human intervention in nature through architecture. Also in this year, he formulated his nature project Skinning. He took pieces of meadow measuring 30 cm x 30 cm from the ground and cast them in acrylic. He skinned the earth and sealed the open wounds with dadoed and signed aluminum plates. Josef Hirthammer presented his new art - natural pan-sensualism - to the public for the first time in an extensive exhibition in Solothurn, Switzerland in 1993. Many exhibitions, mainly in Switzerland and Germany, presented his natural art with objects, photography and painting in the following years.

In 1997 he realized his project "10 Cities". In each case 4 blue pieces of happy nature were sent as a donation to 10 German cities, combined with the wish to the respective cultural officers to present the donated objects in a joint exhibition. The transnational action was not completed in the end, because some cities did not participate. However, the donated art was accepted. Another highlight in his artistic work is the large-scale project Traces of Nature. In a traveling exhibition, Josef Hirthammer intends to set up 12 individual installations in German city centers, each occupying the downtown areas for 3 weeks. The elaborate execution has not yet been scheduled. In 2001 he went public with this project. In 2003 Josef Hirthammer created 20 installations in and with nature in the immediate vicinity of his home. He rearranged and restructured the existing chaos of nature. For days he collected blossoms, which were then orderly integrated into other places. These sometimes very laborious restructurings were and are of short duration. They are recorded photographically.

Pseudonym JOSATI // In 2007 Josef Hirthammer rediscovered older abstracted representations of man for himself and creates under the artist name Josef Josati, again a consistently new way of representing man. The human being is belittled, reduced to a comic figure in order to take away his supposed importance. Nevertheless, the themes are very socially critical, sometimes cynical and always political.

Josef Hirthammer deliberately defies categorization. His multifaceted work does not allow for classic pigeonholing. Diversity is his trademark. Painting, drawing, photography, digital painting, sculpture and installations are his design media. Stringently pursued diversity characterizes his multifaceted forms of expression and philosophies. He is considered one of the most versatile artists of our time and has created several thousand works of art in the 40 years of his artistic career.