Schützenhöfer, Günther

Austria, 1965

Günther Schützenhöfer is a draftsman who is able to handle pencils and colored pencils in a way very few other Art Brut artists are capable of doing. In addition to his ability to reduce form to what might be called a minimal distillation of the subject matter, he has a masterful understanding of how to compose the picture plane with a pencil. Whether carried out in gray (with lead or graphite pencils) or in color, his surfaces become formations that are intensely and captivatingly flat, but almost three-dimensional. The contrast of light and dark within a single stroke is repeated across entire areas containing no hint of perspective. They are layers or levels that look like miniature fields worked with a plow or similar device; here the effects generated by a single stroke are often like the furrows and ridges of the ground.