Josef Pillhofer. Retrospektive

The year 2020 marks the tenth anniversary of Josef Pillhofer's death, while 2021 will be the centenary of his birth. To celebrate these occasions, the present catalog commemorates the life and work of one of Austria's most important sculptors and draftsmen.After studying with Fritz Wotruba and others in Vienna, Pillhofer moved to Paris where he studied with Ossip Zadkine. His engagement with the protagonists of cubist sculpture-including Jaques Lipchitz, Alexander Archipenko, Henri Laurens, Constantin Brancusi, and Alberto Giacometti in addition to Zadkine-influenced his formal language. In his depictions of figures, Pillhofer would start from realistic conditions, but he increasingly integrated non-representational geometric objects into his oeuvre. Wilfried Skreiner has described him as "Austria's first non-representational sculptor."
Text: Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Ivan Ristic, Josef Pillhofer, Alfred Schmeller.