Helmut Schober: Vortex

The famous international painter and performance artist Helmut Schober (* 1947) has focused for the past 40-odd years on the vortex and its intercultural content. Over the decades the vortex has remained a constant in his oeuvre, always supported by his main preoccupations of depicting and making tangible light, time, space and cosmos. The qualities ascribed to the vortex include, amongst others, the constant cyclical continuity of life, triggered by the continuous rotation, as well as fate and fear. We feel ourselves to be subjected to a power which we cannot influence. Today’s world, its conflicts, the unfair distribution of property and economic decline, the resulting fear and the unpredictability of the future - all these are merged into the metaphor of the vortex. This attractively designed volume visualises the vortex in numerous illustrations. It captures the viewer in its swirling maelstrom and prompts emotions.

International painter and performance artist Helmut Schober has focused for the past forty-plus years on the vortex and its intercultural content. Throughout that time, the vortex has remained a constant in his oeuvre, always supported by his main preoccupations of depicting and making tangible light, time, space, and cosmos. The qualities Schober ascribes to the vortex include, among others, the constant cyclical continuity of life, triggered by the vortex’s continuous rotation, as well as fate and fear. Schober works from the premise that we feel ourselves to be subjected to a power that we cannot influence. Today’s world—with its conflicts, the unfair distribution of property, economic decline, and the resulting fear and unpredictability of the future—emerges powerfully through the metaphor of the vortex.

This volume presents a number of Schober’s works in high-quality reproductions, showing how he has visualized the vortex in numerous illustrations. In this wide range of works from Schober’s career, the vortex draws the viewer into its swirling maelstrom and prompts powerful rushes of emotion.