Marc Adrian

_{1930 Vienna 1930 - 2008 2008 Vienna}

The Viennese artist Marc Adrian (1930-2008) is considered a pioneer in many areas of contemporary art and an inventor of new visual worlds. After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna under Fritz Wotruba, as well as in Paris and Milan, he was initially associated with the “Wiener Gruppe”. Around 1960, he emerged as a protagonist of the internationally active neo-avant-garde in the artists' associations ZERO, Neue Tendenzen and arte programmata and was described by Peter Weibel as the “father of Austrian media art”. In 1965, he was the only Austrian to take part in the important Op Art exhibition “The Responsive Eye” at the MoMA in New York. There he showed one of his geometrically precise and visually intriguing “behind-glass montages”, which made him internationally famous.
These assemblages challenge the viewer to actively change their point of view in order to see optical changes in the works. In addition to participation, movement, time and regularity are central elements of Marc Adrian's art. The starting points of his artistic work were sculpture, painting, op art, computer art and concrete poetry. At the same time, Adrian created a series of avant-garde experimental films and was one of the first to use the computer as a medium. After the Second World War, he succeeded in developing an artistic career that included pioneering works in the fields of language, visual art and experimental film.