Garber’s artistic oeuvre includes drawings and boldly colorful paintings as well as objects, although his ink drawings packed with detail represent his central body of work. In these, the entire picture plane is filled with a uniformly dense array of figures, objects, ornaments, and writing. Above all, we find nature spreading out across the sheets created by the artist, in depictions of people, flora, and fauna. Characteristic pictorial elements include the sheets’ rich variety of drawn frames or depictions of the moon and sun at the top left and top right. The content of the works is often provided by personal memories like vacations as well as images of tourist sights, such as St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna or the Houses of Parliament in London. Garber’s earliest drawings are documented from 1977 onward. He created his first works in pen and ink in 1979. In the early eighties, Garber began to create pictures based on reproductions of artworks, including prints by Albrecht Dürer. The first sheets in which he used wax crayons, gouache, and colored pencils are colorful images of people, animals, and machines. In a manner that can certainly be compared with August Walla, Garber appropriates objects and his surroundings by painting them—or, to use a less ambiguous term, “painting on” them. This can be seen in the garden of the “House of Artists” and in his large installation, the “Garber Salon,” where he has gathered together his drawings and objects on two walls.

Johann Garber was born in Wiener Neustadt on August 12, 1947; he initially grew up with his grandmother and then later in youth homes. After attending school, he began an apprenticeship as a house painter and decorator, but he quit before completing it, deciding to work for a construction company. Garber’s first stay at the “Lower Austrian State Mental Health and Care Facility at Gugging” was in 1966. He moved there permanently in 1968, at the age of twenty-one, and has remained ever since, with the exception of a one-year period. Stimulated by Johann Hauser’s occupation with drawing, Garber also began to draw. Since 1981 he has been living and creating his art in the “House of Artists,” where he has also set up a workshop of his own in the basement to work on his objects.