Tschirtner created his extensive body of drawings between 1971 and 2006. It is very homogenous and is defined by a reductive visual idiom. The artist’s oeuvre consists mainly of small-format drawings in ink on white paper. Large-format works also appeared subsequently, beginning in 1980: primarily in permanent marker on paper, at first, and then later mostly on canvas. He used paints to color in some of his work. Tschirtner’s best-known motif is the “headfooter”— a depiction of a person whose torso is missing or greatly reduced in size and is usually surrounded by two or four elongated limbs. He drew these “headfooters” from the front and in profile, alone and in pairs or groups, sometimes opting to show them in motion or within a setting. These sexless figures almost always appear passive, as if they were unrelated to the world around them and one another. The artist additionally created images of simple motifs like clothing, useful everyday objects, and plants or animals, characterizing all of these in a very succinct manner. These works stand out for their pronounced reduction of forms as well as abstraction of their subject matter. For example, Tschirtner depicts a handkerchief in the simple geometrical form of a square with four contour lines. Contextualization takes place through the title, which is located at the upper edge of the picture and is always placed on the sheet or canvas before anything else. Influenced by his original desire to become a priest, Tschirtner took the Christian faith and its commandments to heart and brought these to the page with a subtle sensibility. Thus we find works that revolve around the themes of peace as well as the Ten Commandments. The latter also find their way onto the sheet in textual form in the artist’s reinterpretation of their content. Besides his titles and material of this kind, writing appears in his works in the form of his signature (sometimes consisting only of his initials “O.T.”) and the date.

Oswald Tschirtner was born in Perchtoldsdorf on May 24, 1920, and grew up in a strict Catholic family. In 1939 he was forced to serve in Germany’s Reich Labor Service; he subsequently went to college and was then drafted into the German army’s intelligence service and sent to Stalingrad. He became a French prisoner at the end of the war, and that is when he developed a mental illness. He was hospitalized continuously beginning in 1947, and he lived in the “Mental Health and Care Facility at Gugging” from 1954 onward. Tschirtner was one of the first patients to have his artistic talent discovered and fostered. Tschirtner’s successful career as an artist began in 1971. He moved into what is now the “House of Artists” in 1981. During his own lifetime, Tschirtner became a wellrecognized and—particularly in the final years of his life— successful artist. He passed away on May 20, 2007.