Man with Small Balcony/ Sokrates

After Josef Pillhofer had received his first significant artistic influence in the class of Fritz Wotruba at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, a scholarship led him to Paris in 1950. Here the artist was given the incredible opportunity of entering into dialogue with the outstanding protagonists of modernist sculpture. As a student in Paris, his teacher was Ossip Zadkine. Pillhofer impressed Henri Laurens, whom he was allowed to visit in his studio over several months. Pillhofer’s 1957 Rome scholarship gave him the chance to study the sculptures in the Etruscan Museum in detail. The full human figure and the motif of the head determined Pillhofer’s central artistic tasks, made plain by both, naturalistic conglomerates of form with lively surface modelling and as purely abstract forms. Josef Pillhofer used stereometric forms such as cubes and cylinders to develop compact, self-contained concentrates of form. For his formal inventions of ideas treatment of the surface and sensitive handling of the material were essential.
Josef Pillhofer was a ‘special occurrence in Austrian art history’9, whose artistic credo is clearly shown in the following quotation from him:
‘To be modern means to proclaim the unusual. Yet modernity is not yet a criterion for value. Rather, quality in modernity is achieved through the timeless facts of a picture, a sculpture, an artistic unity in time.’2
Marking the tenth anniversary of the artist’s death in 2020 as well as his 100th birthday in 2021, the Leopold Museum dedicated a comprehensive retrospective in 2021 to Josef Pillhofer, one of the most eminent sculptors and draftsmen in Austria.
1 Peter Bogner, „ Das Ideal der Proportion“, in: Exhibition catalogue „Josef Pillhofer. Das Ideal der Proportion“, publ. by Peter Bogner, Künstlerhaus, Vienna 2011, S. 8 f.
2 Josef Pillhofer, in: Exhibition catalogue „Josef Pillhofer. Im Dialog mit Künstlern der Moderne“, publ.by Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Leopold Museum, Vienna 2021, S. 134