Rot auf Weiß

“Red has always fascinated me, it is the color of my life,” Markus Prachensky said. His red color surfaces and spontaneous touches with a wide brush on large canvases are his trademark. It all stands for modernity and dynamism, and is a sign of the liberation of painting. “I wanted at all cost to break out of the geometrical patterns I was caught up in,” Prachensky says. “For almost a whole year I did nothing but draw and I tried to develop a gesture of the hand, a signature that would set me free, give me freedom.” Together with Wolfgang Hollegha, Josef Mikl, and Arnulf Rainer, Markus Prachensky was a member of the St. Stephan artists’ group, founded in 1956 around the new gallery of the same name founded by the cathedral preacher Otto Mauer. Prachensky and his fellow artists stood for a new kind of expressive and informal painting, in line with the international avant-garde. In 1957, Werner Hofmann, at the time director designate of the not yet opened 20er Haus, dedicated a large exhibition at the Vienna Secession to this young artists’ group, presenting them to a broad public. In 1959, Prachensky performed a striking public painting action entitled Peinture liquide at the Vienna Theater am Fleischmarkt. While actors recited mini-dramas to twelve-tone music, Prachensky poured several hundred liters of red paint over three erect canvases over three meters high. Prachensky’s dripping red stage set, one critic wrote, completely outclassed the theater that was taking place at the same time.