Josef Kien Biography
Josef Kienlechner, or Josef Kien, was born in Bolzano in 1903. He has an international orientation like few other painters of his generation with Tyrolean roots. Just a look at his eventful life, whose main stops were Berlin, Paris, Rome and Bracciano, shows the curiosity with which he participated in artistic and cultural developments, always aiming to make new experiences fruitful for himself and his creativity.
After an initial period with figurative and late-cubist approaches from the end of the 1950s onwards he gradually approached abstraction. Here we first notice informal figurative structures, with individual forms characterized by a fascinating frenzy, which later increasingly give way to a geometric condensation, until arriving at concrete and incisive compositions.
The “meditative images” of the late period constitute the final consequence in Kien's evolutionary process. In a very accentuated reduction of figurative means, lines and shapes now join together forming rhythmic geometric orders, which in their balance reflect a serene spirituality. Substantially, from the beginning of his creative work Kien aims for the clear conclusions of a "peinture pure": it is not a question of contents, but of a world that contrasts with the adversities of reality, of the marvelous harmony between form and color in the sense of “a harmony parallel to nature”, in which the material aspect seems in a certain way cancelled.
