Fritz Koller’s art is one of rapidly drawn lines – his pieces were completed within a few minutes, regardless of their size, and he carried out his work with great energy and confidence. Pencils provided the artist’s primary material; he rarely worked in color or other media, such as watercolors or acrylics. In contrast to colleagues like Johann Hauser, he was also willing to create collaborative works – with Arnulf Rainer, for example.

Two different styles can be identified within Koller’s oeuvre, but both were based on his ability to create geometricized abstractions brimming with potent energy. On the one hand, he produced works like the drawing Woman, in which the protagonist is broken down into pieces and then reborn in a distinctive new structure. The grid hinted at in the figure’s torso extends across the entire sheet in other drawings. It serves the artist as an ordering principle, albeit one in which his subjects then disintegrate. In works like Untitled, on the other hand, nothing but imaginary connections remain to hold together the motif, which has been divided up into individual elements. Using his unique form of hierarchical perspective, some parts of the body are enlarged, while others wither. In this way, Fritz Koller has created captivating works that achieve their high quality through the abstraction of the depicted object.