Felix Haspel (1951)

Is Felix Haspel a sculptor? Is he a painter, a graphic artist? Certainly, he is all of these and has taught as a full professor of art for a decade and a half at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. However, he describes himself primarily as a textile artist. In this métier he is considered one of the most important figures of his generation, and from his own early studies at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna to his many years of teaching at the Institute for Textile Design at the Vienna Academy, the handling of fabrics and the exploration of historical weaving techniques as well as their transfer to the artistic present have been an important focus for his own work. No wonder, then, that Haspel also likes to address his fascination with textile surfaces in his sculptural work. "Corsage" and "Support," for example, live as objects not least from the artful confrontation of hard, metallic structures with the malleability of textile shells. The contrast between the hardness of the metal and the softness of the textile is also highly expressive in the form of a bronze-cast object, which is per se hard, heavy and massive.