Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, September 15, 2021: Bruno Gironcoli, an Austrian modern artist, and sculptor (#1365)

Wednesday, September 15, 2021

Artist of the Day, September 15, 2021: Bruno Gironcoli, an Austrian modern artist, and sculptor (#1365)

Bruno Gironcoli (1936 – 2010) was an Austrian modern artist, and sculptor.

Born in Villach, Gironcoli began training as a goldsmith in 1951 in Innsbruck, completing his apprenticeship in 1956. Between 1957 and 1962 he studied in the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In 1977 Gironcoli became head of the School of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, as successor to Fritz Wotruba. He was the official Austrian representative at the 2003 Venice Biennale.

Bruno Gironcoli produced notable and imaginative drawings throughout his life, he is primarily known for his monumental, futurist sculptures. These large-scale creations exhibit abstract and figurative components alike, which together suggest hybrid forms and organically inspired machines. While his contemporaries opted for traditional materials along the lines of wood and marble, Gironcoli gravitated toward unconventional materials such as plastic and polyester. Painted in metallic bronze, silver, and gold, the sleek appearances belie their mundane origins.

Bruno Gironcoli gained public recognition with the large-scale sculptures he began exhibiting in the mid-1980s, in which archetypes and trivial elements meld to form futuristic conglomerates. Yet his career started much earlier, in the 1960s, when Gironcoli, aware of international trends in art, developed his own radical and independent perspective. It is less well known that alongside his work in sculpture, Gironcoli also produced an extensive body of graphic works. Right from the beginning, these often large-format pieces, which became more and more painterly over the years, were not just mere sketches for sculptures. Working on paper, the Austrian artist instead took his own spatial ideas into dimensions that by far transcend any concrete work on physical materials. On paper, Gironcoli animates his own sculptural work: Divorced from real sizes and dimensions, as well as from the laws of physics and the limits of bodies, his schematic figures, animals, symbols, and apparatuses enter into hypothetical connections. They merge to form fantastic and surreal constellations and scenes. Gironcoli’s works on paper are literally “surfaces of considerations”, in which sculptural options unfeasible in space are played out. Bruno Gironcoli.

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