Bruno Gironcoli
°1936, Villach, Carinthie
Worked and lived in Vienna.
Bruno Gironcoli (1936-2010) stands as one of the most distinctive and visionary figures of postwar Austrian art. Trained as a goldsmith before studying fine art, he developed a knowledge of craft that would underpin his lifelong exploration of material and form. From the early 1960s, he forged a unique visual language, merging the industrial and the organic to probe the existential conditions of postwar life.
After early experiments with polyester forms, Gironcoli turned, in the 1970s, towards the large-scale, hybrid sculptures for which he is best known: anthropo-mechanical works fusing abstract and domestic motifs into futuristic machines. These complex structures – at once chariots, altarpieces, shrines, gigantic organs, and spacecraft – embody his sustained meditation on humanity’s cycles of birth, desire, destruction, and decay.
Throughout his career, Gironcoli also produced an extensive body of drawings and works on paper that extend his sculptural imagination beyond physical constraints. In these “surfaces of consideration”, schematic figures, tools, household appliances, and symbols intertwine to form foreboding landscapes.
From 1977 until his death, Gironcoli served as Professor and Head of the School of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, shaping generations of artists with his radical independence and vision. While often associated with the Vienna Actionists, he remained an outsider by conviction. Awarded the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art in 1997 and representing Austria at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, Gironcoli left behind an oeuvre that defies categorisation.
