Georg Eisler

In 1936, Georg Eisler’s family fled Austria, first arriving in Moscow and then, when Eisler was 11, in the north of England, where he became a student at the Stockport School of Art. He met Oscar Kokoschka in London, and in 1946 returned to Vienna in 1946 to study at the Academy of Fine Arts, going on to win the Austrian State Prize for painting. His works, strongly influenced by Kokoschka’s expressionism, include industrial landscapes that attest to his childhood memories as an evacuee in Manchester, as well as nudes, still lifes, and, in particular, paintings of crowd scenes that attest to the hustle and bustle of modern life – groups huddling together in restaurants or jazz bars, or waiting for the train. Highlights of this survey at the Belvedere (8 April–25 September) include paintings such as Café Sperl (1975) and Straßenbahn(1972), which demonstrate Eisler’s fascination with what the artist described as the ‘psychological spaces between figure and figure’. The exhibition makes use of Esiler’s his personal diaries from between 1962 – 1997, to offer an intimate insight into how he thought both of his artistic process and the world around him. Find out more from the Belvedere’s website.

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