The artist’s oeuvre consists almost entirely of pencil drawings, and its primary focus is on highly detailed and laboriously composed maps. In the first years of his work as an artist, he created drawings of animals and people as well as vehicles and everyday objects. However, Fink did not limit himself to these motifs: he additionally immersed himself in a fantasy world and created human-animal hybrids. With their invented words, the pictures’ titles already suggest the artist’s interest in language. The stylistic element of these texts began to appear in 2006: featuring freely associated rhyming phrases, they repeatedly fill the otherwise empty background. His interest in the environment, his surroundings, in places, in tourist sights, and in facts related to them also revealed itself early on. Fundamentally influenced by his father’s profession, Fink’s interest in geography has culminated in the primary motif of his oeuvre, which he has been developing since 2007: the map. These large-format pencil drawings generally cover the entire picture plane and show countries, regions, and cities. The artist sketches keenly observed geographical data on his maps: mountains, lakes, streets, churches, towers, public institutions, bridges, tunnels, or trains are depicted two- or three-dimensionally, in distorted perspective, from a bird’s-eyeview, frontally, and in profile. Fink establishes a system of hierarchical proportion, a cartographic depiction with a variable scale in which details that are important to him are depicted as larger than other content. Streets and their cars are invested with particular significance and often spread across the entire picture plane like a spider web. The motifs’ labels make it possible to identify mountains, lakes, and towns, and we can even see future construction projects like the U5 subway line in Vienna. Fink’s art expands his viewers’ (chronological) horizons and carries us off on a journey into a fantasy world. 

Leonhard Fink was born on January 15, 1982. He grew up with his parents and four siblings in the Lower Austrian town of Weidling (now part of Klosterneuburg). His father is a geographer and geologist, which also explains Fink’s great interest in these subjects. Fink attended the lower-level secondary school in Weidling; his knowledge of English, which he repeatedly employs in the texts found in his works, goes back to his education there. He received psychiatric treatment for the first time at seventeen, and this is also when he created the first drawings exhibiting signs of his artistic talent. From 2001 to 2020, he regularly visited the atelier gugging, and he soon arrived at his own distinctive and very succinct form of artistic expression. Fink is represented by the galerie gugging, and his works have been exhibited in the museum gugging since 2012.