(Vienna 1929–2008)
‘Orange Figur’, 1965, inscribed in the artist’s hand on a paper label on the reverse ‘Orange Figur’, oil on canvas, 190 x 200 cm, framed, (K)

Full-page colour illustration:
Werner Hofmann, Josef Mikl, Gesellschaft der Kunstfreunde Wien 9, p. 125

Exhibited:
XXXIV Esposizione, La Biennale di Venezia, 1968 (paper label on the stretcher)

Provenance:
From an Austrian Collection

About the object
What one sees and what one has seen is not so easily forgotten.
Therefore there are no really fictitious or no purely non-objective pictures. Only an object lends meaning to a picture.
Meaningful content goes hand in hand with form and technique. Only an airhead can claim that a picture is bad but well painted or that its creator has got imagination but no sense of form, etc. A picture’s content is inevitably figural in character, for one can only express what one means in a specific context. Drawing from life supports this concrete way of thinking. For the draughtsman, a tree, a child, or a nude function as proportional models, they teach him how to transfer spatial bodies to the flat surface and how to think logically.
Art history only knows logical pictures, each of which is a world of its own, although it is made under the impression and based on the experience of reality; it must do justice to all demands, even those posed by fools: by the schoolmaster, for whom form suffices and who only sees the technique and what is superficial, and by the idiot, who asks for nothing but content.
Josef Mikl, quoted from the literature mentioned above