Up until the age of 25, Herbert Schager’s life was unspectacular. After the commercial academy, the Aschacher worked in sales accounting for a company in Leonding. But he soon got bored with it. “Every morning I had the feeling that I wanted to keep going,” he says.
At 25, Schager was fed up with life. He resigned and went to America for two months before applying to the Linz Art Academy (now the Art University) without much preparation. “I was lucky,” he says. “The professor for lettering and book design was looking for students and accepted me.” From then on, art was the determining force: “Life began in the art school.” Fascinated by screen printing, he switched to commercial art, completed his studies in 1982 and has been living as a freelance artist ever since – meanwhile in an artist dynasty: his wife Helga, daughter Oona Valarie and son-in-law Ufuk are artistically active, son Felix is a rapper.
Herbert Schager turned 70 on Monday and is celebrating his birthday with an exhibition at the Paradigma art association in Linz, which opened yesterday. In it he shows exactly 70 works (worth between 150 and 900 euros) and returns to his roots: the basis for the cycle “Neues Altes” are blind pencil drawings from the early 1980s. “I found them in the basement when we were moving and saw potential,” says Schager. So he continued to work: he traced the lines in black with thick permanent markers and colored the areas in blue, red and yellow. The pictures have become striking, with gripping colors that always catch the eye in front of a bold blue background. Mostly women can be seen, sometimes as portraits, sometimes facing each other, sometimes almost brutally exposed. An exciting experiment that was created in a 40-year journey through time. But why was he drawing blind back then, 40 years ago? “It was an exercise,” he says. “I couldn’t draw and I was shy. I wanted to sharpen my eyes with it.”
Today Schager, who received the State Culture Prize for Video in 1994, prefers to work with his mobile phone. He takes photos on his walks, selects the best ones and edits them directly on his smartphone using various apps. Then he prints out the images on a canvas and adds them again with brushes and pens. The artist often sits in front of a picture for hours and looks at it. “Then my gut feeling tells me what needs to be done.”
“I couldn’t play there”
Herbert Schager never got rich with his art. He could not live from the sale of his works alone. “You would have had to curry favor, because I could never play.” So he was dependent on private sponsors. Nevertheless, he has never regretted his life, he says: “I live for art.”
- The exhibition “70” by Herbert Schager can be seen every Friday from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. until February 11 or by appointment at Tel.
Source: Nachrichten
