Hans Staudacher

Hans Staudacher is an established artist, who was born and brought up in Austria. Hans Staudacher was born in 1923 in Steindorf am Ossiacher See, Carinthia. Some of the artist's contemporaries that are born around the same year and in the same country include Hans Schwarz, Inge Morath, and Kiki Kogelnik.

Hans Staudacher is a multiple award-winning, Austrian painter whose work is attributed to the genres of Tachism and Action Painting. He is the founder of Art Informel in Austria.

Staudacher showed an early interest in painting, initially in a self-taught capacity in the form of drawings, landscape watercolours and portraits. Later on he enrolled in a painting school taught by Arnold Clementschitsch. He moved to Vienna in 1950 and started to study the art of Alfred Kubin, Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt. Soon afterwards he became a member of the Vienna Secession; his Informel exhibitions were pioneering at the time in Austria. The artist took up temporary residence in Paris between 1954 and 1962, where he came into contact with works by George Mathieu and the Letterism genre. These two elements defined his artistic oeuvre from then on. His works adopted an abstract style from the 1960s onward, and his pieces represent a unique combination of lyrical Informel art and Abstract Expressionism.

Staudacher received the honour of representing Austria at a foreign Biennale on three occasions, namely 1956 in Venice, 1965 in Tokyo - where he also took the first prize - and finally 1975 in São Paulo, which he attended together with Cornelius Kolig and Gotthard Muhr.

Staudacher has also received numerous awards for his artworks throughout his long and successful career, including many prizes from Biennales, the Golden Badge Honour for his services to Carinthia and Vienna, awards for graphic art from countless competitions held worldwide, as well as a large number of cultural awards. He was presented with the Cross of Honour for Science and Art, First Class, by the Republic of Austria in 2004.

His works are included in numerous public and private collections around the world, among them the Albertina Graphic Artwork Collection.

Hans Staudacher passed away on 16 or 17 January 2021 in Vienna.