About the Artists

Michael Lechner

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Michael Lechner was born in Vienna in 1949. He comes from an art-loving family with long-standing roots in Vienna and Lower Austria, who made him familiar with art at an early age, so that the visual arts soon became a goal in life. 1969 - 1975 he studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna / MKI Carl Unger. During his studies he received several prizes and in 1976 a Paris scholarship, which enabled him to study at the École supériereure des Arts décoratifs, Subject: Etching / Atelier Lacourrière Frélaut from 1976-1978. At the beginning of his time in Paris, the renowned galleries Lucien Durand and Jeanne Bucher took him into their programs. Works by him can be found in the Centre Pompidou collection, Paris, as well as in the Fondation Meaght in Saint-Paul de Vence. As early as 1978 he was able to move into the legendary studio of the painter Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899) near Fontainebleau.

Since 1990 he has been given a work Atelier in south of Paris/Chatenay-Malabry by the French Ministry of Culture lead by Jack Lang. In 1983 Lechner was an residence artist / CIRCA / Villeneuve les Avignon. He obtained various Austrian and French awards and honors. Numerous international exhibitions and exhibition participations since 1973. Until 2015 he lived and worked primarily in Paris and in Petronell/Carnuntum during the summer months. He moved to Petronell since 2014.

His motives for going abroad were intellectual curiosity, the search for new challenges, the desire to discover new worlds and art forms. Even in the 1970s, Paris was still a fascinating city of art, where European modernism began, where you had to go and establish your own art myth. Michael Lechner is a subtle draftsman and painter. In the field of tension between drawing and painting, the focus is on musical, often constructivist-looking rhythms of colour gradients, lines and surfaces. The pictorial architectures develop almost serially from a few basic forms, which through their creative conceptions create color-melodic forms. the structures, set with a minimalist gesture, create interplay of lineamentums, monochromatic image spaces and image surfaces that oscillate between abstraction and architecture.

Pastel, acrylic, pencil and coloured pencil, tinted papers and Pierre Noir, a black slate stone, with Specific dark and especially matt black colour tones can be obtained, which above all have a priming character and result in a special surface effect, are those elements with which the peculiar pictorial character is created in the separation field of painting and drawing.

Structure, rhythm and movement create a fragile character that associates the volatility of information or knowledge. The strongly graphic design, the linearity of the picture structure, which choreographically sketch the individual sheets as well as the perspectives of transparency, top view and oblique view thematize the space of the picture. In the subtle visual execution (painting / drawing) a kind of atmospheric poeticism emerges, a literature of the landscape, so to speak.

   Translation into English of the text from Carl Aigner

Excerpt from the catalogue of the exhibition "NAHE FERNE, NÖ Landesmuseeum St. Pölten 2015 - 2016"

Michael Lechner's exhibitions enjoy decades of international success and have been accompanied by some very precise texts (Pierre Cabanne, Pierre Tilman, Günther Feuerstein, Alain Jouffroy, Günter Metken, Jaques Leenhardt, Bernard Noel, Kristian Sotriffer, Francois Wehrlin, Olivier Kaepplin, Clauede Schweisguth, Friedrich Achleitner, Carl Aigner) who also position the respective phases in terms of art history.