The artist Michael Horsky was born in Prague in 1973. As a student of Wolfgang Hollegha
and Hubert Schmalix, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna from 1991. In
1996, Horsky accompanied the International Summer Academy in Salzburg as an
assistant to Professor Georg Eisler. Horsky's works are characterised by a figurative-
abstract pictorial language in which the human or animal figure is broken down into partial
forms. These body forms are stripped of their usual function and only emerge from the
picture in the course of viewing. In his most recent works, small-scale architectural
elements - also depicted in multiple views - take over this ornamental function. The
painting process plays an important role in Horsky's work: beneath his finished oil
paintings lie up to twenty painted layers. While the formal language is based on art history
and, in terms of perspective, is reminiscent of Picasso's cubist portraits, among other
things, the choice of colour is also based on earlier art movements and is borrowed
above all from Andy Warhol's intense colouring and the earthy tones of the Middle Ages.
With his special form and colour, Horsky challenges the viewer with an unusual, bold and
abstract painterly practice. After various exhibitions in Austria and Switzerland, an
exhibition in Madrid followed in 2015 and a solo exhibition at the Galerie Frank Elbaz in
Paris in 2021. The artist lives and works in Vienna.