Karl Plattner - Pensive Woman at the Window

Portraiture is one of the most widespread artistic expressions, especially in painting, but also in sculpture, throughout the ages. Portraiture is, first and foremost, a description of the depicted subject, an attempt to convey their physiognomy and individual characteristics truthfully and naturally. With the progressive evolution of artistic research, the physiognomic description of the subject has also been accompanied by a psychological one. Therefore, over the centuries, portraiture has also become a means of introspective investigation of the subject, their character, and their state of mind. The processes of abstraction brought about by contemporary art have contributed to this type of investigation. The human figure, in general, is central to the research of the artist Karl Plattner, of which he has rendered a highly interesting and original expressionist and existential interpretation.

As we can see in this beautiful engraving, Karl Plattner's expressionism of the human figure is not based on abstraction and the synthesis of the figure, but rather on a rather objective representational mode. Plattner's characters, in fact, have a markedly illustrative and almost caricatural quality, as the artist emphasizes the deformations of the figure, precisely in an expressionistic vein. The main distinctive feature of Karl Plattner's work lies in the form he employs. His characters are constructed through an extremely elegant graphic line, which the artist uses to unleash his boundless creativity in drawing. Thus, through this objective expressionism, his works always have a magical and surreal quality while ultimately maintaining a strong connection to the concrete reality of his subjects, who are always popular figures of peasants or of a derelict humanity.

Karl Plattner was born in 1919 in Malles. After training as a painter in 1955, he studied fresco painting under Sebastian Fasan, a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, also specializing in drawing and etching. During World War II, Plattner served in the German army and was taken prisoner in Livorno by the American army. After his prisoner of war, he continued his studies in Florence, Milan, and Paris. During this period, he received his first public commissions for frescoes in South Tyrol. In 1955, Plattner won the competition to decorate the conference hall of the Autonomous Province of Bolzano with frescoes and murals. From 1963 to 1978, he lived in Milan. Over the course of his life, he received a total of twenty-one significant awards and recognitions, including the Austrian Honorary Medal for Science and Art and the Tyrolean Art Prize. Plattner died tragically on December 8, 1986.

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