Peter Prandstetter. Coda.

To mark his 90th birthday, the City Archives/City Museum, as part of its exhibition series dedicated to Tyrol’s ‘quiet artists’, showcased one of the quietest among them: the Innsbruck-based painter and draughtsman Peter Prandstetter. Ever since his ‘discovery of painting’ around 1950, Peter Prandstetter has become an integral part of Tyrol’s art scene.

The exhibition, entitled CODA, centred on the Tyrolean artist’s 24th sketchbook of the same name, which was completed in 2013. It consists of 112 pages of handmade paper and was meticulously rendered by the artist using watercolour techniques. It brings together many motifs that he has revisited time and again over the decades and, in the sense of the musical term ‘coda’, can be understood as a summarising or fading-out concluding section (of a composition), in this case of his oeuvre.

Drawing on examples of works selected by the exhibition’s curator, Elio Krivdić – ranging from the artist’s early years to the present day – watercolour and drawing, gouache paintings, and works in the medium of reverse-glass painting, which had been one of his main interests since 1970, the exhibition was given a retrospective character, so to speak.

The curator’s catalogue text also addressed aspects of this man’s creative output—who was passionate about both art and music—that had never before been the subject of discussion: for example, his (in the context of the Tyrolean art scene) very early affinity for abstract expression, his approaches reminiscent of the ideas and practices of conceptual painting and drawing, or his innovative style in reverse-glass painting, through which he elevates this discredited medium to the level of contemporary art. It is here, above all, that his artistically innovative nature manifests itself: by deliberately combining a carefully selected antique frame and a suitable pane of glass with the painted glass surface (the image), he creates an inseparable unity, thereby transforming the reverse-glass painting into a modern pictorial object.

The artist has been pursuing these ideas concerning the (picture)frame has been a recurring theme for the artist since his early days around 1950, and he explores it not only in the field of reverse-glass painting or in his works on paper, but also in the medium of the colouring book – a medium he has also been using since 1980 alongside his other techniques (this spring saw the creation of the latest, the 26th, of his sketchbooks).

The exploration of the concept of the frame and the framing of (his) pictures was also addressed in the exhibition.