Adolf Frohner Austrian, 1934-2007

Adolf Frohner (Groß-Inszersdorf, Austria 1934 - Vienna, Austria 2007)

Born in 1934, together with Otto Muehl and Hermann Nitsch, he was a co-founder of the Viennese Actionist movement. This movement, born in Vienna in the 1960s, carried forward an impetuous, radical and explicit form of performance art. The group collaboratively staged, filmed, and photographed performances known as “actions”. They made assertions that broke taboos, often illegal, with repellent actions that expressed violent dissatisfaction with the government and bourgeois society of post-World War II Austria.

The Actionists thought that Austrians were suppressing memories of the unspeakable atrocities committed by the Nazis in their country and tried to force people to face these traumas through their art.

Frohner began producing abstract paintings with the Viennese Actionists, later concentrating on panels and the representation of feminine figures.

Adolf Frohner moved to Vienna in 1952, where he attended the Academy for Business Advertising and, simultaneously, as a visiting student, the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts with Herbert Boeckl. In 1961, Frohner worked as a freelance painter and illustrator, spending a year in Paris with a UNESCO scholarship, where he met the Nouveaux Réalistes artists.

Frohner represented Austria at the 1969 São Paulo Biennial and the 1970 Venice Biennial. In 1972, Frohner was awarded the Austrian State Prize and appointed a professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. In 1989, he was also deputy rector of the University. 

In 2007, the artist died unexpectedly at the age of 73.

© Adolf Frohner Estate. Photo UniCredit Group