In his pictorial worlds, Hermann Staudinger shares his fascination with gold. Tamed in its glow, he uses it as a kind of door-opener: his art is meant to open spaces that invite reflection and evoke emotional resonance - a view into the essence of life.
The mild wind makes the last autumn leaves on the tree shimmer golden in the light of the already low-hanging sun. A radiant gleam that continues inside the small brick house next to it—regardless of season or sunlight. Since the mid-1990s, Hermann Staudinger has kept his studio here in Vienna’s 16th district. A few years ago, he moved his workspace from the main house to the little house in the courtyard. One hears nothing of the bustling activity of the nearby Brunnenmarkt. A hidden gem in the middle of the city, it offers the calm he needs to work.
With all this shimmering, one obligatory question arises: Is all that glitters here truly gold? “Next question,” he laughs dismissively. “Most of it is actually 24-karat gold— even the pieces that appear matte are real gold. Ultimately, it’s a matter of gilding technique whether a piece shines or not.” But a break-in would not be worthwhile. The amount of gold leaf he uses, thinner than a human hair, is negligible. The working time, however, is not: depending on the format, he spends one to two months on each of his “gold-ground embossings.” “First, I gild a softwood panel that serves as the image carrier,” the artist explains, pointing to a forest motif that immediately catches the eye upon entering the studio and shimmers in the dim light.
“In the next step, a manipulated paper photograph is stretched over the gilded panel before the actual work begins.” The motif is neither drawn nor painted: “Using thousands upon thousands of tiny pencil strokes, the black areas of the paper template are traced onto the gold purely through pressure, without transferring any pigment.” The relief-like texture created in the gold breaks the incoming light and ultimately produces the characteristic depth of this body of work.
A sparkling fascination
Staudinger’s work has been inseparably linked to the precious metal since 1995. But his original fascination goes back much further: at the age of ten, he illustrated the fairy tale The Frog Prince and discovered that he could render the golden ball only as an orange-yellow. “The fact that I simply couldn’t get the gold right bothered me immensely,” laughs Staudinger, who discovered his passion for art early on. “Visual art was always my home, my refuge,” he reflects.
Even then, he appreciated the solitude of the process without ever feeling lonely. “You may be alone while working, but you’re always at the center of what’s happening.”
That he would eventually make a career in art was not immediately obvious—given his many interests—but his urge for artistic expression grew steadily. Ultimately yielding to it, the Upper Austrian native enrolled at Vienna’s University of Applied Arts in the late 1980s to study graphics and painting under Ernst Caramelle.
A look at his artistic roots reveals that back then he created large-format pencil drawings—such as cloud images made from swirling pencil marks—and photographic series, for example of sleeping dogs. Both media would later play a central role in the development of his singular visual language. The golden roots of his oeuvre reach back to the end of his studies: “A friend who was studying under Gironcoli at the time and working with a wide variety of materials introduced me to gilding,” he recalls.
Is art allowed to be beautiful?
Gold becomes an omnipresent constant: “It is the permanence and the beauty that continue to fascinate me without interruption,” Staudinger enthuses. “Of course, gold can be instrumentalized as a symbol of power—but for me it’s far more about capturing the warmth of the sun. I want to touch people emotionally and open up spaces.”
Gold, he argues, is capable of exactly that: “Just think of icon painting,” he explains. “There, gold stood for a transcendent space.” Although Staudinger’s teacher Caramelle always taught with reference to art history, Staudinger insists that his work is not about historical allusion; he neither seeks nor avoids it. What interests him far more is the sacred effect of gold—“a helpful vibration, so to speak.”
One thing is certain: the beauty of the precious metal fascinates across generations. According to Staudinger, embracing it is not, despite the prevailing mood of the contemporary art world, something to be frowned upon: “Art must be allowed to be beautiful—without necessarily being pleasing,” he stresses. “What matters is that the gold is not too dominant. It demands to be integrated.”
On Emotional Perception
How this succeeds varies from series to series: while the underpainting in Staudinger’s Gold Walls complements the gold, in the representational groups—the Gold-Ground Photos, in which the motif is printed via inkjet onto the gilded support, and the gold-ground embossings described earlier—it is the motifs themselves that keep the brilliance of the gold in check. Where does Staudinger find them? “In my head and in my heart, but also in my immediate surroundings—such as nature,” says Staudinger, whose motifs often depict familiar scenes.
Clarity, he adds, is secondary: “When I was in my twenties and spent three months in New York, I stood in MoMA before a painting by Ad Reinhardt,” he recalls a formative moment. At first, he thought Reinhardt’s square Black Painting was a paraphrase of Malevich’s Black Square. “Only on second glance did I see that the work consisted of nine individual squares, each subtly different in its shades of black. It took time to decipher the message—and that’s when I understood what it means to be an artist and what art is about.”
This is a quality Staudinger himself employs: “It’s not about what is absolutely obvious—it’s about non-verbal communication. Not primarily about understanding, but about emotionally grasping and experiencing.” The factor of time, which fosters artistic dialogue and resonance, is essential in viewing the works. It is not unusual, therefore, that Staudinger presents close-up details in his pieces: like a kind of zoom-in, he focuses on the essential, the elemental. “I’m not interested in showing things—in my art, I don’t report about something, but from something. I don’t observe; I speak from the center of the matter,” he explains.
Energy on a Higher Plane
His representational works always originate from photographs he has taken himself. The technique by which they later find their way onto the picture carrier is ultimately of secondary importance: “The technique is interesting because it helps transmit energy,” says the artist, “but virtuosity is not what I’m striving for. What I want is to elevate energy to a higher plane—to share what I have experienced with viewers, to let them partake in the beauty of that experience. At the end of the day, it’s about opening a kind of window onto the miracle of our existence. To create, through that view, a space for viewers that reaches far beyond daily life—that is a rewarding endeavor.”