Josef Linschinger (1945) - vertikal diagonal horizontal — from the *hommage à max bill* portfolio

Josef Linschinger (Austrian, b. 1945): vertikal diagonal horizontal — from the *hommage à max bill* Portfolio**

Year: 1988
Technique: Original silkscreen on paper
Edition: 60
Signature: Hand-signed in pencil
Dimensions: 30 × 30 cm (sheet)
Condition: mint (comes without frame - frame available for 40€)
Provenance: Published by Edition Partanen, Schluchsee, Germany, 1988.

BIOGRAPHY

Josef Linschinger (b. 1945, Gmunden, Austria) studied from 1970 to 1975 at the school of design in Linz and taught there from 1975. He has long lived and worked at Altmünster on Lake Traunsee. From 1977 he produced concrete and constructive work examining the elementary vocabulary of line, point and plane; from 1987 he extended this into visual and concrete poetry, treating language — numbers, letters, machine-readable codes such as the barcode — as concrete visual material rather than as a carrier of literary meaning. He founded and directed the Symposium for Concrete Art in Gmunden, which over its history presented the work of some six hundred international artists. His work is held in the Artothek des Bundes, the Austrian federal art collection.

ARTWORK

Linschinger's contribution sits exactly at the meeting point of his two domains — geometric construction and the visual treatment of the sign. Read against the portfolio theme, the three directions function less as composition than as a system of intervals: a measured ordering of the surface in which reading and seeing become the same act. It carries Bill's conception of art as ordered thought into the territory of sign and language, close to the tradition of Eugen Gomringer.

PROJECT CONTEXT

This print is one of eight original silkscreens by eight artists, published as the portfolio *hommage à max bill — vertikal diagonal horizontal* (Edition Partanen, Schluchsee, 1988) to mark the 80th birthday of Max Bill (1908–1994), the central figure of Concrete art. The title is also the name of the constructive artists' group founded in 1982 by Ben Muthofer and Heinz Gruchot. Each work is hand-signed, edition of 90. An introductory essay by the art historian Dieter Bogner situates the group within a market-independent "constructive international" that carries the legacy of the historic constructivist avant-garde into the present.