Born in Basel in 1934, Alfons Schilling first completed a bank apprenticeship in Switzerland before beginning his studies at the Academy (now University) of Applied Arts in Vienna in 1956 (master class of Eduard Bäumer). Around 1960, he turned away from academic painting towards action painting. In 1961, Schilling had his first exhibition at the Vienna gallery Junge Generation together with Günter Brus. This was followed by a five-month stay in Paris, where he worked more intensively on his "rotation paintings": paintings on rotating circular surfaces driven by a motor. Shortly afterwards, Schilling moved to New York, where he met Kiki Kogelnik and Sam Francis. He took on craft work in studios of various artists, including Sam Francis, Al Held and Alex Katz; he also got to know Billy Klüver from Bell Laboratories and the E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) association. From 1966 onwards, he concerned himself with the synthesis of space and movement in the image. He dealt intensively with holography and stereoscopy and worked on lenticular photographs. In 1967, he became friends with the video pioneers Steina and Woody Vasulka, with whom he also collaborated. In 1968, he produced lenticular photographs of demonstrations in Chicago, and in the same year took part in a group exhibition in the US for the first time at the Richard Feigen Gallery in Chicago. In 1970, he had his first solo show at Feigen in New York. In 1971, he travelled to Iceland with Woody Vasulka, where most of the photographs for "Brainscapes" were taken. He began experimenting with pinhole photography. In 1973, he developed a kind of virtual reality video helmet, and in the course of the 1970s and 1980s various portable vision machines and the “autobinary stereopaintings” that shaped his further work. He taught at various art institutions (including the Cooper Union and Hunter College in New York) and had performances and exhibitions in the US and Europe. In 1977, he undertook a trip to Africa that lasted several months. In 1978, he achieved his artistic breakthrough for good with a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York. In 1985, he was awarded a Fellowship of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 1986, Schilling returned to Vienna and held a visiting professorship at the College (now University) of Applied Arts until 1990. In 1987, the solo exhibition "Sehmaschinen" took place at the Vienna Museum of Applied Arts (MAK), in 1997 the large retrospective "Ich/Auge/Welt - The Art of Vision" was held at the Kunsthalle Krems. In 2007, another solo exhibition was dedicated to him in the series "Artists in Focus" at the MAK. Finally, in 2009, the Essl Museum in Klosterneuburg organised a large exhibition of his work, which was accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue. After suffering from Parkinson's disease, Alfons Schilling died in Vienna in 2013.
Literature
Exhib.-cat. "Alfons Schilling. Sehmaschinen.", Museum für angewandte Kunst, MAK, Vienna 1987; exhib.-cat., Hubert Klocker (ed.), "Alfons Schilling. Ich, Auge, Welt - THE ART OF VISION," Kunsthalle Krems, Vienna/New York, 1997; "Alfons Schilling. Die frühen Bilder", Vienna 2008; exhib.-cat., Günther Oberhollenzer (ed.), "Alfons Schilling", Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg 2009; exhib.-cat., Inés Ratz/Peter Coeln/Rebekka Reuter (et al.) (eds.), "Alfons Schilling. Beyond Photography," Fotomuseum Westlicht, Vienna 2017
Read more in our exhibition archive "Alfons Schilling. Autobinary Sterero Paintings".