Smolka Contemporary

Hubert Schmalix is known for his luminescent landscapes and figurative work. For Schmalix figuration has always been a crucial element of his work, but his focus lies less on the image content than on colour, form and surface.   Over the decades, and due to his move to the Philippines and Los Angeles, a transition from an expressive-gestic towards a contemplative, reduced form vocabulary is discernible. Besides numerous female nudes, his luminescent landscapes and Californian rows of houses captured from a bird’s-eye view in contrasting colour fields are the most impressive examples of his mature work. His motifs merge set pieces of bucolic scenes such as mountains, alpine cabins, flowers, waterfalls, gushing streams and driftwood into painted idylls. It is the permanent search for a locus amoenus which, while it doesn’t function as an existential perspective, is indeed a metaphor for the right life within the wrong one.   Hubert Schmalix (*1952 in Graz, Austria) lives and works in Los Angeles and Vienna.

Smolka Contemporary represents established as well as emerging contemporary Austrian artists. The gallery, located in the cultural district in central Vienna, was founded in 2013 by Elisabeth Melichar. The programme encompasses painting, drawing, photography and sculpture.