Kernbeis created an oeuvre full of stereotyped motifs. Houses, animals, flying objects, vehicles, flowers, and particularly trees can be found on the sheets drawn by him. There is no way to describe these images created with pencils or colored pencils more specifically. A brown trunk and oversized green leaves surrounded by contour lines drawn in pencil and inserted dynamically and purposively onto the picture plane illustrate the artist’s reductive formal idiom. The subject matter is depicted in a two-dimensional manner and is made up of different pieces that appear as if they have been stuck together. He seems to insert one part into another and then fill in the shapes. Analogous stylistic elements and motifs are represented in his oeuvre from its early phase, beginning in the seventies, to its late phase. The way he labels his works presents an interesting stylistic characteristic. The titles often display spelling mistakes, and the dates of the works created since 2000 are recorded in a kind of phonetic transcription. The year 2001 is written as “2000.1” (“two thousand and one”). Kernbeis’s original profession as a farmhand and his work on his parents’ farm made a deep impression on him. In addition to the tree, which testifies to this influence, his small to life-sized images also often contain animals, such as cows and horses viewed from the side, as well as plows. In 2006 the plow—i.e. “Pflug,” or actually “blug,” following Kernbeis’s idiosyncratic spelling of the title written on a drawing—also provided the name for the first exhibition at the newly opened museum gugging. 

Franz Kernbeis and his twin brother Johann were born in Prigglitz in the Lower Austrian district of Neunkirchen on March 23, 1935. He was the youngest of seven children and attended the elementary school in Prigglitz for eight years. He subsequently worked as an unskilled laborer on his parents’ farm. Kernbeis’s psychological problems first appeared when he was seventeen. He was in care continuously from the time he was nineteen; in 1952 he stayed for the first time at what was then the “Mental Health and Care Facility at Gugging.” From 1955 onward, he lived at Gugging permanently; in the sixties his psychiatrist Leo Navratil occasionally assigned him the task of drawing something. He then began creating drawings regularly in 1979. In 1981 he moved into the “House of Artists” with his creative colleagues, and he lived and worked there until his death on April 14, 2019.