Erich Steininger & Florian Schaumberger

The exhibition will showcase Erich Steininger’s work, focusing on prints and woodcuts, which gradually transition from figurative motifs to abstract structures and layered colors that connect the body with the landscape. The second section is devoted to the sculptures of Florian Schaumberger, which minimalistically depict the human head and figure as geometric, even architectural forms.

Erich Steininger: Layering and Breaking Down Boundaries

Erich Steininger’s work, presented at the exhibition at the Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum, spans two decades of artistic creation and brings together key groups from his extensive body of graphic work: a 14-piece series of woodcuts from the 1990s and a five-piece series of monotypes. Woodcut—a relief printing technique—represents a true artistic discipline in his work. Steininger’s woodcuts have been created with remarkable consistency and continuity since the mid-1960s. Initially still influenced by a figurative and expressionist approach, they increasingly evolve toward an abstract-structural and ornamentally evocative visual world. In the series of works titled The Body Turns into a Landscape, pink, yellow, and black colors are overlaid using a complex printing process. By printing several plates on top of one another onto a single sheet, the figure and the structure begin to intertwine, condense, and dissolve into one another. The line increasingly breaks away from its purely descriptive function, becomes independent, and begins to form networks. The body breaks down boundaries—it becomes a landscape. The layering of colors and the interweaving of lines and planes act as a visual reflection of this hope—as if a process of liberation were taking place within the image itself. Monotypes bring a different, almost radiant accent. In this technique, an aluminum plate is first coated with printing ink, which is then wiped away with a brush. A second plate introduces a blazing, fiery orange color, as well as the black of the marks. This gives rise to unique pictorial events—fiery, atmospheric, carrying an immediate painterly presence.

Florian Schaumberger: Minimalist Heads

Florian Schaumberger’s current sculptural work is characterized by concepts such as materialization, minimalism, and a focus on the elementary. The works on display at the Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum from the Head and Ahead series straddle the line between figurative and architectural approaches. In the Head series, cubic forms intertwine. The shape of the head is radically minimized and translated into a vertical and horizontal coordinate system. The organic form transforms into an architectural structure. Schaumberger studied at the Academy of Fine Arts under Joannis Avramidis; he was influenced by the Cubist school of sculpture following Wotruba, yet the human figure always remained at the center. The sculptor radicalizes the formal language into a minimalist distillation bordering on abstract expression. Schaumberger’s works refer to the human figure and constitute self-contained sculptural units. The Ahead sculptures are upright, columnar structures whose vertical statuary quality evokes guardians. The sculptor first creates his sculptures from wooden planks and then has them cast in bronze, such as the version of Shining Ahead with a golden sheen. Beyond their formal dimension, the sculptures radiate a spiritual power—something focused, contemplative, and inward, present within itself. These current works are diametrically opposed to Schaumberger’s earlier welded steel sculptures, which were characterized by dynamism, openness, and violent expressiveness.