I have been portraying people since 1989 – all in the same technique and with the same intention. The images are carried out with a spatula – red oil color on raw canvas, sized 180×140 or 180×120 cm. Each of the portraits captures someone who majorly influences my life and my artistic practice. Some of them are contemporaries, known or unknown to me, others people who I love, who I care for, who I adore, some of them have passed away centuries ago – they talk to me through their literature, their art, their spirit – they inspire me.
A good naturalistic portrait contains the character, the spirit of the portrayed person. I ‘translate’ people into chairs – I portray them as chairs. The portrait captures their character, their soul. Why would one want to have a person represented by a painted chair? Of all commodities we use, the chair resembles us the most – first of all in terms of anatomy as it is supposed to fit the shape of our body, their ‘physiognomy’ resembles people. We have a very intimate relationship with chairs as most of us spend more time on them than anywhere else. The chair can be used as a commodity, as a gadget of convenience, but it can also represent a human being e.g. in the apsis of churches we often find a chair, wooden or carved out of stone that is never being used – even during service it remains empty. It is reserved for the bishop and therefor it represents the dignity. Although the clergyman was/is never present nobody is allowed to use it. It is reserved for him only as it represents and substitutes him and his status. Chairs could and can refer to the social status of the user – the higher ranked a person was/is, the more comfortable the chair had/has to be.
Though I work in many different mediums ‘painting’ is chosen in this context for a reason. Since the canvas is not being treated with gesso, stains occur on the surface of the raw linen. Often the very thick layer of red oil paint extracts linseed oil that soaks the canvas around the image and stains it dark. The chair develops a shadow that appears as if it was surrounded by an aura, a process I cannot influence. Some chairs/humans have more of an aura, some less, some don’t seem to have any. All chairs appear awkwardly flat since there in no central perspective applied to the paintings. Most of them have only two legs instead of four, some are wrecks others have missing parts, they all have handicaps. None of them is perfect.
On first glimpse a red-chair-image I chose to represent a person might appear random. Why for example would Jean Luc-Godard have the shape of the chair I ‘selected’ or made him to be? Why do I turn someone into an existing chair or a made up chair, or an abstraction, for whom do I invent a chair that does not exist? If one were to flip through some of the chair-portraits and found a person he/she personally knows and on top of it another chair-portrait of a ‘celebrity’, then one could already get an idea of how I translate the persona into a chair. I think of people I am fully in tune with, I feel, I read them and a chair appears in my imagination that is them. Yet e.g. the artist Yoko Ono turned into a sofa that appears like half a grapefruit, Apichatpong Weerasethakul turned into a bunch of feathers floating in the wind – once in a while I don’t succeed in transmuting a personality into a chair. So far about 120 people have been portrayed.
In a photo Series entitled 97-(13+1) which was featured at documenta X, Kassel 1997, I refer to the concept above as I link the characters of Japanese individuals to old rotten chairs found in the streets of NYC. Then I let the person pose with the chair I have selected for him or her for a staged photography.

some portrays 1989-2019
ANJA SALOMONOWITZ (film director) 2017 BRIGITTE WÖSS (teacher) 2013 CHRIS MARKER (film maker) 2006 CY TWOMBLY (painter) 2015 DAVID WÖSS (business man) 2007 EDGAR HONETSCHLÄGER (artist/filmmaker) 2006 EDGAR HONETSCHLÄGER (artist/filmmaker) 2013 ERHARD GROSSNIG (industrialist) 1990 FEDERICO FELLINI (film director) 2005 FEDERICO SECONDO (emperor) 2016 FERNANDO PESSOA (writer/poet) 2013 FOSCO MARAINI (anthropologist) 2009 FRA ANGELICO (artist) 2017 FRANCO KAPPL (artist) 1995 GERTJAN ZUILHOF (film programmer/art historian) 1998 GIORGIA O’KEEFFE (artist) 2017 GIOTTO (artist) 2017 HOSHU NAGAOKA (buddhist priest) 2006 ISABELLA GULLO (agent) 2017 JACQUES TATI (film director) 2009 JEAN-LUC GODARD (film director) 2010
JOHANNES SPALT JR. (production designer/photographer) 2013
JOHANNES SPALT SR. (architect) 2004
JOHN CASSAVETTES (film director) 2016 KATHARINA STEINKELLNER (ngo/fundraiser) 2008 KATSUSHIKA HOKUSAI (artist) 2017 KLEMENS ORTMEYER (photographer) 2017 LUCHINO VISCONTI (film director) 2013 MAKO IDEMITSU (artist) 2017 MARGARETHE SEE (art teacher) 1993 MARIA CONCETTA SPINOSA (interpreter) 2013 MARIA PANY (restaurant manager) 2005 MARTIN BÖHM (auction house director) 2017 MASACCIO (artist) 2017 MICHELANGELO CARAVAGGIO (artist) 2015 MIDORI MITAMURA (artist) 2017 MIDORI YAMAMURA (art historian/curator) 1992 OLAF MÖLLER (film programmer) 2017 OSCAR NIEMEYER (architect) 2017 OTTO HONETSCHLÄGER (business man) 2013 PETER WALDENBERGER (radio producer) 2007 PIERGIORGIO BOTTOS (cameraman) 2013 PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA (artist) 2017 SABRINA MONTANARO (dreamer) 2012 SIMON WÖSS, (philosopher), 2017 WOLFGANG LORENZ (tv director) 2017 YASUJIRO OZU (film director) 2009-2018 KURAHARA YASUYUKI (business executive/musician) 2010 YUKIKA KUDO (producer/film director) 1994 ZHIXUAN FRIDA LI (art theorist) 2016 AKIRA KUROZAWA (film director) 2013 ANDREI TARKOVSKY (film director) 2011 APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL (artist/film maker) 2007 BARBARA FRÄNZEN (music+film expert) 2017 CAROLINE ALKHAFAJI BÖHM (philanthropist) 2012 CATHERINE DAVID (curator/art historian) 2010 CHRISTIAN FENNESZ (musician) 2009 CLARICE LISPECTOR (writer) 2013 CLAUDE LÉVY-STRAUSS (anthropologist) 2011 CLAUDIA MÄRZENDORFER (artist) 2017 DAVID HOCKNEY (artist) 2011 DEREK JARMAN (film director) 2009 DONALD RICHIE (writer/film critic) 2013 EDGAR HONETSCHLÄGER (artist/filmmaker) 1989 ENRICO LUNGHI (curator) 2012 ERNST J. FUCHS (architect) 2007 FRANZ GRAF (artist) 2013 HAZEL ROSENSTRAUCH (writer) 2008 HENNY ULM (art historian) 2017 HISHIDA SHUNSO (artist) 2011 JAN TABOR (architecture critic) 2014 JOHANN LEITNER (musician) 2017 JOSEPH BEUYS (artist) 2010 KAZUKO KOIKE (curator) 2017
KAZUKO MIYAMOTO (artist) 2010 KAZUTO TAGUCHI (student) 2012 KURT KLADLER (gallerist) 2017 RYO LEO KOGAI (scholar) 2017 LEZA LOWITZ (writer) 2004 LG 305 LUCAS REINER (artist) 2012 LUKAS BECK (photographer) 2017 MARGARETHE SCHÜTTE LIHOTZKY (architect) 2018 MARIE–THERESE HARNONCOURT (architect) 2017 MARIO CODOGNATO (art historian) 2017 MARTIN HOCHLEITNER (art historian) 2010 MAX HARNONCOURT (IT specialist) 2016 MEINHARD RAUCHENSTEINER (philosopher/writer/bureaucrat) 2012 MIHOKO SUGIURA (restaurant owner) 2011 MORTON FELDMAN (composer) 2014 ISHIHARA NOBUHIRO (artist) 2010 NOEMIE BALLOF (student) 2010 NORBERT ARTNER (artist) 2015 OGAWA USEN (painter) 2015 PAULINE SCHÜRZ (bureaucrat/neighbor) PETER ABLINGER (composer) 2008 RANDY NEWMAN (musician/composer) 2011 REINHARD JUD (film director/screen writer) 2011 ROLAND TEICHMANN (bureaucrat/photographer) 2010 RAOUL DUFY (artist) 2012 SHERRI WARD (garden architect) 2008 STEFAN FAULAND (film editor) 2017 STEFAN GRISSEMANN (journalist) 2017 SYLVIA ECKERMANN (artist) 2012 THOMAS FEUERSTEIN (artist) 2010 THORSTEN SADOWSKY (art historian) 2017 WASSILY KANDINSKY (artist) 2012 YOKO ONO (artist) 2008 JAMES GOLDWASSER (book dealer) 2019 CARLO BRIGNOLA (sculptor) 2019 BENEDETTA TORINO (art manager) 2019