Christian Franz Joseph König

Christian Franz Joseph König attended a Catholic grammar school and trained as a graphic artist in Vienna. His first exhibition took place in 1980 at the gallery Junge Kunstwerkstatt in Vienna. He worked as a graphic artist and art director in national and international advertising agencies; evening life-drawing classes at the Vienna University of Applied Arts (Prof. Schulz) deepened his pronounced talent for figurative representation.

Representational painting has been declared defunct for quite some time — yet the genre survives as a foundation and constant challenge to grasp the visible world in paint. König’s works are not representational at first glance; they do not correspond to the prototypes of figurative painting, and the visible world seems abstract, not directly present.

Countless sojourns on various continents have deepened the artist’s engagement with other cultures, whose mythological and spiritual contents inspire his work. He sketches and paints on site, collecting impressions and insights which he transforms and visualises in his studio — the continuum of space and time dissolves; retrospection, introspection, foresight and confrontation blend seamlessly.

König developed the technical prerequisites of his multi-layered painting technique off the beaten track of academia. Working as a studio assistant to painters such as F. Kindl and Theo Braun and, from 2004 onwards, assisting Gee. Douangjan (Ramkhamhaeng University, Bangkok) for several months at a time played an important role in his painting.

The artist plays with the possibilities of perception in figurative representation: like other living beings, we humans are programmed to respond to a small number of visual key stimuli. Setting these stimuli, allowing the viewer a comprehending reception of his works, has increasingly become the artist’s task. The works present a closed system carrying several meanings: disorder seems to reign in them — yet upon longer contemplation the pictorial details enter into relation with one another, establishing new references to our real world.

Today he lives and works in Vienna — painting, by his own admission, in a representationally abstract manner.

Dr. Edith Risse, art historian — edited version