Karl Neubacher was one of the pioneers of avant-garde and conceptual art in Graz. As a graphic designer he created significant works for the avant-garde festival steirischer herbst, for the shoe company HUMANIC, the art magazine pfirsich (as a member of the art makers’ group pool), and others. 

His legendary posters, which were always based on artistic concepts, won international renown and awards, e.g. the Graphic Design Excellence Award, icograda. The overall picture of applied arts and austere forms of fine arts created a unique tension that defined Neubacher’s artistic practice in the 1960s and 1970s.

The central preoccupation of his art was his own body, which he employed directly in performances whilst also instrumentalising it as an image in its own right in photography and film: Neubacher himself became a ‘public art figure’. The short films created in the 1970s are a product of his intense struggle for the validity of artistic expression waged between avant-garde radicalism and realism.

In addition to numerous illustrations and a DVD (short film Zimmerlinde, 1975), the catalogue includes a foreword by Peter Pakesch, texts by curator Günther Holler-Schuster, Orhan Kipcak, Horst Gerhard Haberl, Bogdan Grbic, and Klaus Hoffer.

Published by AMBRA, Vienna
240 pages, DVD, German/English