Christian Ludwig Attersee

_{Bratislava 1940}

Born in 1940 in Bratislava (formerly Pressburg), Slovakia, Christian Ludwig Attersee moved to Austria in 1944; today he lives in Vienna and in Semmering in Lower Austria. Attersee spent his youth in Aschach near Linz and on the Attersee in Upper Austria. He was one of Austria’s great sailing sportsmen – hence the pseudonym Attersee. He has made a name for himself not only as a sailor and visual artist, but also as a musician, writer, object maker, designer, stage designer and filmmaker.

Yet Attersee is mainly seen as one of the most important representatives of European representational painting of the last 40 years; more than 500 solo exhibitions in many countries of Europe and in the USA reflect the accomplishments of this artist. Early exhibitions from the mid-1960s bring success, as well as friendship and collaboration with such artists as Günter Brus, Gotthard Graubner, Jörg Immendorff, Markus Lüpertz, Hermann Nitsch, Walter Pichler, Dieter Roth, Gerhard Rühm and Oswald Wiener, among others.
Since Attersee’s first object inventions (1964-66) in the fields of eroticism and everyday life, he has been seen as an independent artist who helped shape European Pop Art. He is the great maverick of Austrian art of the 1960s, especially as the antithesis of Viennese Actionism. In the second half of the 1970s Attersee is a founding member of ‘New Austrian Painting’.