Friedensreich Hundertwasser

Painter and architect Freidensreich Hundertwasser built his career around his love for the natural world. Hundertwasser’s lifelong rejection of the monotonous, straight lines that dominate man-made design led him to design undulating, biomorphic forms that would exist in harmony with their surrounding environments.

Hundertwasser’s lifelong rejection of the monotonous, straight lines that dominate man-made design led him to design undulating, biomorphic forms.

During Hundertwasser’s early career as a painter, he was strongly influenced by the Abstract Expressionist movement’s emphasis on spontaneity and by Surrealism’s juxtaposition of unexpected subject matter. Through his vibrant paintings, which often feature labyrinthine spirals splashed with droplets of contrasting colors, Hundertwasser developed the concept of “transautomatism,” a theory that emphasized the power of fluid lines to evoke subconscious feelings.

In the 1950s, Hundertwasser turned primarily towards architecture, pioneering an alternative “organic” architecture movement that prioritized rounded, untraditional forms in defiance of the classic rules of architecture. Best known among Hundertwasser’s many projects is the Hundertwasserhaus, an apartment building in Vienna that features a grass-covered roof, a multi-colored façade, a room with an uneven, ergonomic floor, and several large trees growing in the interior.

For Luna Luna, Hundertwasser created a collaged poster of a carnivalesque dreamscape depicting two faces with tongues sticking out of their mouths. With twin caps made from rising suns, eyes falling over crashing waves, and faces made from many-windowed city buildings, these two faces draw the viewer into André Heller’s “territory of surprises,” as a phrase on the poster reads.