Michael Ornauer

You work and live in Neulengbach, where Egon Schiele spent 21 days in a basement cell at the district court 110 years ago. How does Neulengbach address this chapter in the chronicle of art history?

Today, you can visit the very same prison cell in Neulengbach – it is in its original state. There is a watercolor by Schiele titled The Orange Was the Only Light, which depicts his prison cell. The house where Schiele rented an apartment in 1912 and painted several works is still standing, but it is privately owned. The house was up for sale a few years ago, but unfortunately, the city of Neulengbach failed to purchase it and turn it into a public space, such as a museum. Generally speaking, Tulln has been much more successful in engaging with Schiele’s legacy (and in marketing it). However, Tulln is also Schiele’s birthplace, where he spent his childhood, while he was only in Neulengbach for a brief period – with the well-known and very abrupt ending. I think the relationship between Schiele and Neulengbach is still somewhat unbalanced.

Numerous paintings from Tulln testify to Schiele’s close ties to his hometown. Did this unique cultural and natural landscape along the Danube influence you artistically?

Yes, definitely! I grew up on a farm in the area around Neulengbach, and my childhood memories are deeply connected to nature. The gently rolling landscape of the fading Alps has had a profound effect on me to this day. There is hardly anything rugged here; instead, there are many curves and soft lines. The landscape always gives me a sense of balance: to the south-east, the dense Vienna Woods; and to the north-west, the expansive Tullnerfeld. Neulengbach lies at the border between these two regions. It’s a mixture of contrasts, and that’s exactly how I feel about myself and my artistic work. It’s often about harmonizing contrasts in terms of shades, forms, and materials – hard and soft, light and dark, cold and warm, etc. That’s how my paintings come about.

The state of Lower Austria values contemporary visual art and offers a wide range of support. Do you see this commitment as an obligation toward artists?

Yes, there is NÖDOK (the Documentation Centre for Modern Art in Lower Austria), the Artothek Niederösterreich (a program for the purchase of artworks by the state government), and many other funding programs. However, I can’t say much more about this because my path has not been based on public funding but on the art market. My goal was and is to sell my work to collectors through galleries. A few years ago, I tried to get an exhibition at NÖDOK or to have my paintings purchased by the state. I was rejected everywhere, and that was the end of it for me. Of course, I could try again every year, but I prefer to focus my energy on the international art market, art fairs, etc., rather than end up like a prophet in my own country with a bruised ego.

Studying painting at the academy, entering the art market as a young artist, and the first gallery representation – all with one goal in mind: to make a living from your work. How difficult is it to succeed as an artist?

The goal of creating art is always to create art – under all circumstances and often against all circumstances. In other words, if I only create art to make money or to survive, that’s a poor reason. If I create art to be recognized and famous, that’s equally questionable motivation, and it will probably never lead to “true” art. The only reason to make art is simply: to make art. That’s why you study at an art university, and that’s why you exhibit! Money, recognition, and external success are by-products of internal success – creating art that you develop first and foremost for yourself. Anyone who has ever felt this inner success – when a good painting comes together, and you stand alone in front of it in your studio and feel joy – knows that selling that same picture will never match the inner satisfaction of creating it.

Your painting style has changed over time. Is it due to the healthy ambition to try something new, or the necessity to establish yourself?

You go your way, and with it, your work changes. Whether you’re established or not has nothing to do with it. As I mentioned earlier, if you focus on this side of things, you risk losing the art itself. Is there a way? For me, it arises with age and the changes that come with it. Everything is dynamic, and we humans should be too. But not everyone embraces this movement. Many people prefer security; they choose to stick with what they already know rather than start something new. But that’s death before you die – standing still and getting stuck. Whether you are 20 or 60, there’s no difference – dead is dead!

How would you describe your current painting style?

As concrete painting; not abstract in the true sense of the word, because my painting does not abstract from material reality, but rather materializes from the spiritual. At the same time, my painting has no symbolic meaning; it is purely about the image as an object that does not refer to anything outside of itself.

Virtual art is currently on everyone’s lips. What is it all about? Do you also see your works in the language of non-fungible tokens (NFTs)?

As a painter, I have the advantage of creating real objects (not virtual objects). Why should I give up this unique selling point in favor of digitization? If I were a representational painter, it might be different, since figurative painting can still function as a likeness. But with abstract work like mine, where the feel of the material plays an essential role, I see no benefit in NFTs, aside from making a quick buck. I have no interest in that, and it would only dilute my work.

At the 59th Venice Biennale, Austria will once again be represented by not one, but two women: Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl. In general, female artists and women are emotionally omnipresent in the art world. Do you feel disadvantaged as an artist?

I didn’t feel favored 20 years ago, nor do I feel disadvantaged today. I also don’t see female artists or women in art as omnipresent. On the contrary, I see a good mix of all binary and non-binary genders here. Perhaps we can at least slowly start to take an interest in the art itself, rather than the gender of the artists?

Finally, the classic question at the end of every interview: “Where do you see yourself in five years?”

I don’t ask myself this question at all, and I actually consider it irrelevant or even problematic. In five years, we might just as well be dead! What sense does it make to think about the future in the here and now? What about today, in this moment? That’s the only relevant point in time to ask yourself questions, without the completely hypothetical answers to questions like: Who am I, why am I doing this or that, and how did it come about? Where will we be (and who will we be) in the future? These are all fantasies that our overburdened minds conjure up instead of dealing with the present. There is no better preparation for the future than to consciously live in the present. Those who understand this also lose their fear of the future. The future will take care of itself; our task is to take care of the reality we are currently living in.

Michael Ornauer’s paintings do not tell a story. They are entirely focused on themselves—on color, gesture, painting material, and support. Pure and infinitely rich in the exploration of painterly processes, everything arises within this process, developing from a spontaneous treatment of color on the raw painting surface. This can range from a monochrome wash of thin oil paint to layers stacked on top of each other, then partially exposed again, to nearly mountain-like piles of thick lumps of paint, placed closely together, with extreme intensity in both their materiality and color depth.

The spectrum of color, both as an optical phenomenon and as a material to explore in painting, is vast. Lightness and heaviness, wildness and gentleness, color shock and calm monochrome: if viewers take their time and look carefully, they can discover the range of painterly techniques the artist uses, playing with and experimenting through them.

The exhibition 16×12, a title that may initially seem a bit perplexing—especially if you haven’t seen the works yet—shows a current series by Ornauer. While the artist has previously favored a variety of formats in line with his working method, in this series he focuses on a single format—an unusual one at that. In recent decades, the trend has been for paintings to grow larger and larger, driven by the desire to capture attention in an image-saturated age. Ornauer, however, takes the opposite approach: 16 x 12 cm is the format for all of the works. A bold decision, an unconventional path, but also an exciting one, as a visit to the artist’s studio reveals. There, on a table, he has placed many of these miniature works, and some are also hung on the wall. My first impression was almost overwhelmed, as the painting appeared strikingly loud at first glance due to its dense presentation. But slowly, the eye drew closer to this concentrated and dense work, rediscovering the color expressions that define his style, along with similar color intensities and material densities.

We are no longer accustomed to taking time for small things, yet it is incredibly interesting to study these miniatures. The exploration of painting possibilities, the desire to experiment with color, and the application of it in diverse ways—traits we already know from this artist—can be rediscovered here in a concentrated form. Ornauer adopts a conceptual approach to this exceptional series. Each day, he creates a small series of works that explore variations on a found pictorial expression. For example, one day may yield works painted entirely in monochrome black. On another day, the bold, densely layered color blobs emerge. These may seem particularly idiosyncratic because such powerful concentrations of color are applied so thickly to the small format, creating an intriguing combination of heaviness and miniaturism.

It is precisely in these small series that one notices both similarity and diversity, gaining a deeper understanding of the subtleties of Ornauer’s painting. The artist’s great passion is palpable, especially in his concentration on a single, small format—his fundamental questions about painting, his engagement with its basic conditions, and his exploration of the endless possibilities for reworking it. You can feel this passion.

On the occasion of Spark Art Fair 2022, Galerie Suppan presented a solo exhibition of new works by Michael Ornauer, showcasing his monochrome black paintings and sculptures.

In this series, Ornauer moves away from the traditional Western ideals of beauty, drawing instead on the spiritual depth of Japanese aesthetics—particularly the philosophy of wabi-sabi, which embraces imperfection, impermanence, and the quiet elegance of the incomplete.

In his creative process, Ornauer paints over completed works with layers of black, then sands or carves into the surface to partially reveal the underlying colors. This act of concealment and exposure becomes a meditation on maturity, veiling, and fragmentation. For Ornauer, monochrome painting—especially in black—is not merely stylistic; it holds a sense of finality, of something absolute.

Unlike in nature, where black rarely appears without combustion or decay, Western culture often associates the color with death and mourning. In contrast, within Japanese culture, black is linked to life and seen as a positive force. This divergence in meaning can be traced back to ancient Greece, where black and white began to symbolize the binary of evil and good. For centuries, black was seen as sinister and uncanny—until 20th-century art began to reclaim it.

Among the two “achromatic” colors—black and white—Ornauer consistently favors black. For him, black holds depth and multiplicity; it is not just a color but a primordial condition, akin to the state of the cosmos. His black surfaces are punctuated by small points of color or light, suggesting both emergence and dissolution. In Ornauer’s work, black is the space from which things arise and to which they return.

Rooted in Far Eastern thought, Ornauer’s understanding of black departs from Western associations with death or destruction. Instead, black becomes a symbol of life, of mystery, and of the unknown.

Michael Ornauer, born in Vienna in 1979 and now based in Neulengbach, Lower Austria, originally comes from a background in representational painting. Until 2008, he studied in the masterclasses of Hubert Schmalix and Amelie von Wulffen at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Numerous solo and group exhibitions followed, along with a position as a freelance lecturer at the renowned Städelschule in Frankfurt.

In 2017, however, Ornauer made a decisive break from figuration. He rediscovered the spaces and surfaces behind his figures and turned entirely to abstraction. What had previously been present—namely, a deep engagement with haptics, color, and material—now became the central focus of his work. Conceptually, the artist is fascinated by the laws of harmony and disharmony, and by nature as an untouchable model.

Ornauer works in series and will be presenting three of them at Suppan Fine Arts.

First, there are the geometric striped paintings, which explore not only the interplay of colors but also test the limits of the material itself. In these works, Ornauer uses multiple kilograms of oil paint—up to five kilos in a single 100 x 80 cm canvas.

Secondly, there are the organic works—paintings that, in the artist’s words, “grow” and rely on an intuitive working process. “I accompany the painting in its creation,” explains Ornauer during a visit to his studio. Particularly striking are his casually executed, organically developed “color cakes”: small wooden panels with piled-up paint, created in parallel to the main paintings. These works essentially capture the excess or remnants of a painting, yet they become artworks in their own right. “The challenge lies in throwing paint without intention,” he says.

The third series, the monochrome works, are a constant and significant element of Ornauer’s practice. He considers them a kind of essential counterpart to all his other work. In these paintings, a biographical influence becomes especially clear: Ornauer practices Zen. This entails not only daily meditation and ongoing mindfulness but also a profound affinity with the Japanese aesthetic philosophy of wabi-sabi. In Japanese, wabi denotes the sparse, the solitary, the humble, while sabi expresses experience, maturity, life’s traces, and patina. “Together, these two words mean more than the sum of their parts—both philosophically and personally,” the artist explains.

Once one becomes familiar with his work, the spirit of wabi-sabi can be sensed in every piece within this multifaceted gallery exhibition—well beyond the monochrome paintings. It becomes tangible where Ornauer cuts, scratches, and sands into the surface of the oil paint—within the fractures themselves. 

Where imperfection embeds itself within harmony, Ornauer succeeds in evoking a quote from the great singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, which is essential to him:

“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

Inspiration, feeling, and subject matter – where does it come from? 

That’s a question better asked of a psychoanalyst or someone who scientifically researches causality. As an artist, my task is to do, not necessarily to understand. In fact, intellectual understanding or knowing the cause can be a hindrance in artistic work. In my experience, it’s more productive to create from a blind spot. The work needs the mystical, the inexplicable, the mysterious. If you unravel a piece of fabric to find the thread (the cause), you lose the fabric (the work of art). Our minds always want to understand, to explain. But the beauty of art is that the mind alone isn’t enough to achieve a deeper understanding. This doesn’t just apply to art, but to life itself. What’s the meaning of existence? Where does it all come from? What’s it all for? My answer? I don’t care. I delight in the mystical fabric we call life.

Which artist or art movement inspires you? 

I’ve always had trouble with the term inspiration. I’m not alone—there’s a quote by Chuck Close: “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.” On top of that, inspiration is a word that’s been overused to the point of emptiness—like when a shoe store tells you to “come in and get inspired by our collection.” But I get what this question is really about: Who or what influences me? That changes over time. When I was working figuratively, it was a completely different set of artists. As a young painter, I even liked the Fantastic Realists—but now, you can chase me away with that. Today, it’s artists like Pierre Soulages or Per Kirkeby whose work fascinates me. At the moment, abstraction has a firm grip on me—I even believe it holds the key to all artistic questions. Of course, 20 years ago, I thought the same thing about realistic painting. Now I know I was wrong. So I watch these shifting influences with curiosity, but I don’t take them too seriously anymore. One thing, however, has remained constant: my admiration for the Old Masters.

How much time do you spend with art each day? 

I have a regular workday, which has settled into a rhythm over the years and only shifts slightly from time to time. Certain tasks—like stretching and priming canvases or other preparatory work—I prefer to do in the morning. Painting itself usually starts in the afternoon and can continue into the evening. In that sense, creating art is a full-time job for me.

Is there a right time to start a work? 

The short answer: when the time is right. It sounds simple, but in practice, it’s often difficult to sense the right moment. As modern people, we’re shaped by reason and (apparent) logic, which makes it hard to listen to perceptions beyond the rational mind. Abstract painting is an excellent tool to break the dominance of thought and reconnect with deeper senses. As an artist, I need to feel when the moment is right—not only to begin, but also with every single gesture and action during the painting process. How do you know when a work is finished?  That’s perhaps the even more interesting question. And it doesn’t have a satisfying answer either—not for the rational mind, at least.

How important is self-marketing to you? 

I’m honestly not sure what self-marketing is supposed to mean. As an artist, I feel a kind of mission—and maybe even a tendency toward self-promotion. I see that not only in myself, but in many of my colleagues. You can even see it throughout art history. But does that mean Rubens was a self-marketer? I don’t think so. The term self-marketing fits better in the world of startups and freelancers. That’s where it belongs. I don’t market myself—but I do make myself and my work visible. Because I’m convinced that what I do has relevance beyond my personal sphere—it speaks to others, too.

What else is there besides art? 

As I mentioned, art is my full-time job—and my purpose. Of course, life offers much more, especially connection with other people. But even that is part of the artistic process. After all, no artwork exists without someone to receive it. To answer what else there is beyond art, we’d first have to define what we mean by art. My own work certainly fits within a traditional concept (I make painted images and objects), but I also embrace an expanded notion of art—like the one Joseph Beuys proposed. According to that view, there’s not much outside of art. Everything we do, think, feel, or perceive can be, or at least tends toward, art.

What are your plans for 2021? 

A solo exhibition at Galerie Suppan is scheduled for June, and I’ll also be represented by the gallery at viennacontemporary.

It is not colourful—it is coloured—what Michael Ornauer presents. These are compositions of tones layered upon one another, evoking the apparent impossibility of simultaneity: that a single work can encompass multiplicity, and that in each pigment lies not an end, but a beginning—something that only fully emerges through the act of viewing.

Michael Ornauer, born in Vienna in 1979, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts under Hubert Schmalix and Amelie von Wulffen. He offers precise provocations for the imprecise variables of perception. This may stem from his background. 

After years of working with figuration, Ornauer turned to abstraction. But this was not a departure so much as a return—a turning toward what had long been embedded in his practice. He began to focus his gaze on the moments between representations, on the surfaces that form the foundation of any painting—sometimes more present, sometimes less.

By 2018, the “object that you put on the painting,” as Ornauer describes it, became obsolete. The in-between, the search between abstraction and surface, took center stage. Within the constraints of the stretcher frame, Ornauer explores the threshold between image and object. This unfolds across various bodies of work, all of which challenge the fundamental premises of painting.

Whether he scrapes away layers of paint to reveal what lies beneath, experiments with the texture of chalkboard surfaces, or—as in his recent work—molds thick oil paint over the canvas edge, Ornauer navigates freely between geometry and colour gradients. A steadfast advocate of painting, he regards the act itself as a “spectacle,” and fixed interpretations as “overrated.” Painting, he says, is “the form into which I pour myself”—a physical act through which he investigates the parameters of his gestures. He also probes how far he can go—up to the edge of beauty; beauty: that discarded notion of modernism, which can now only re-enter art with courage. Michael Ornauer accepts this provocation. As the philosopher Konrad Paul Liessmann observed, beauty is often suspected of concealing false harmony. But Liessmann also contends that beauty is not defined solely by complacency and symmetry, as traditionally thought—those ideas were rightly deconstructed by modernity.

Thus, Ornauer’s work, driven by intuition, finds its resolution in moments of rupture. By not only accepting but challenging imperfection, he discovers a new form of harmony—one not based on symmetry, but on a kind of balance within imbalance. By holding the doctrines of form and measure in tension with the excesses of sensation, Ornauer proposes a new concept of beauty: one that suggests truth through its supposed imperfections. This appeal creates closeness with the viewer, breaking the sublime distance of abstraction and grounding aesthetic ideals in physical space, as objects, as counterparts. It is precisely through colour—through his insistence on colourfulness—that Ornauer forges these connections. “We’ve been driven out of the colourful,” he says, explaining his compulsion to embrace colour, something he has had to learn to follow. It’s not about pleasing the eye. Ornauer doesn’t merely question the premises of beauty—he redefines them entirely.

As Liessmann writes: “Beauty is also a risk.” Harmony does not always reside in perfect symmetry or proportional clarity. Instead, it arises in the balance between Apollonian structure and Dionysian excess. In the simultaneity of the seemingly opposed.

To understand Michael Ornauer’s way of working, it’s best to follow Leonard Cohen. He sang: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” And the artist Ornauer, born in 1979, always works in a similar way—at the points of fracture, where he recognises the beauty of painting. He encourages madness and breaking the rules. A studio visit in Lower Austria.

Would you like to tell us about your latest work?

Today I did a painting, but now I wonder if it’s really finished. It has beautiful moments, successful colour contrasts, but something is still not right. Overall, I’m dissatisfied with the day’s work.

What do you mean—“dissatisfied”?

My way of working comes very much out of dissatisfaction. I have to work until I am satisfied, but that also means I’m dissatisfied most of the time. I keep changing a painting until there are no more parts that bother me. It’s not a pleasant approach, but it’s the only one I know.

But that also means you have recurring moments of satisfaction—whenever you consider a painting finished.

Yes, it’s a kind of addiction. I can experience brief moments of happiness in painting, in art. It’s a kind of happiness that lies in my own hands. Whether you look at Christian doctrine or Buddhism, both teach that everything is transient. So you can only work to create recurring moments of happiness. It’s about a search for perfection, and a painting is finished for me only when I can’t do anything more to it because it’s perfect. There is hardly anything that is perfect—no relationship, no job, no life situation—but as an artist, I can create perfect moments, and that’s why I can’t stop. It’s a Sisyphean task.

How did you discover that art was the right path for you?

Art doesn’t need me, but I need art. It’s a kind of religion—you promise yourself some kind of solution through it. That was true for me when I started making art in 2003. I come from a completely non-artistic background. I never set foot in an art museum as a child and went to a technical school. Until I was 19, I got by completely without art. When I graduated from high school, I went to the Art History Museum for the first time and almost fainted. I realised there was something there that felt very close to me, and I was a painter—although I hadn’t made any art until then. Art was my salvation in a painful search. I’d love to be a relaxed, easy-going artist who creates from joy, but that’s not me. Pain and suffering are important forces in my work.

Nevertheless, your works are full of positive, affirmative vitality.

Van Gogh’s last paintings don’t look as if he was about to shoot himself either; they’re his most colourful and powerful works. It’s not all that linear or simple. Only those who know deep suffering also know happiness. When you’re willing to go there—when I’m ready to dive into my depths and look at things that might not be pleasant—I also get intense feelings on the other side. We live in a time when negative feelings are cut off as much as possible, but without feeling, I won’t get far in art.

You work relatively secluded in an old villa on the edge of the Vienna Woods.

This villa is beautiful in the conventional sense, but it’s also the nature around it—the silence. But I wouldn’t want to get stuck here. I enjoy the noise, the people. Life means exhausting all sides equally. This retreat is only beautiful because I break out of it again. I need the contrasts that make life rich.

Years ago you worked representationally, figuratively. Meanwhile your paintings dissolve more and more, playing with colour and surface.

My artistic practice is this: I do everything wrong, as wrong as possible. I do nonsense. We try to live our whole lives rationally and efficiently, but there’s no room for that in art. For me, art is the practice that lets me reverse everything I’ve learned. The artist is a fool—he does everything wrong and maybe makes people laugh, but really, they’re laughing at themselves. Art is a kind of catalyst for psychological processes in people. Collectors who live with my works often explain to me, years later, what they’ve suddenly understood. Over time, the art has an effect on them and turns their worldviews around. I’m becoming more and more friends with this fool that I actually am—the one I used to always want to hide because I was embarrassed by it. It’s foolish to spend all day blending colours. It would be more sensible to do something else. But we artists have to hold that up to people—be crazier.

But the art world also has rules.

You have to ignore them. I failed here in the studio today because I was too conventional. The more I let go, the more likely it is I’ll create a good piece that will be exhibited or sold. The more I leave things to chance, the more likely it is that art will happen. The fragility of images and of people is essential. We humans are so unbelievably dense—there are no cracks anywhere. The whole idea of self-optimisation is to fill in the cracks, but that’s the wrong approach. You have to look for the cracks. The more I follow my own path, the more I succeed.

So in retrospect, was it nonsensical to study art? If you’re looking for complete lack of intention?

No, because to break out, you first have to be locked in.