Hendrik Kolenberg
Senior Curator of Australian Prints, Drawings and Watercolours
Art Gallery of New South Wales
The over-riding sensation from Anton Holzner’s paintings is of space. His concern as an artist is the articulation of paint on canvas to create an imaginary reality beyond the visible and material world we occupy, so that we may reflect on our place in the universe.
He eschews the representation of what we see in order to direct our attention to metaphysics, and despite the clarity of his work, he is more interested in the suggestive power of invented form and space than formal pictorial construction. At times his paintings suggest landscape or stella matter suspended in space, or incorporate aspects of the human body. Furthermore, vigorous painterliness and his tonal use of colour suggest varying emotional states, or moods, that contribute to the work’s overall gravity.
Udo Sellbach - Artist
Over the past 50 years Anton Holzner’s work as a painter has been marked by a single-minded approach to art based on deeply personal convictions. His work seems hardly touched by the changing modes and media which have made up the international environment in art during this period. His strength in resisting the waves of fashion have made him a solitary figure in Australian Art putting him in the company of the few whose work has been concerned with inner growth and maturity along the path of time. Holzner’s abstract world is firmly based on experience in which nature and the feeling for its moods and elements play a dominant part. In the best of his paintings, tonal colour spaces appear to create the echoes of a metaphysical realm in which hardness and softness, light and darkness, stillness and movement interact in harmony.
Such a romantic stance which rings of pantheism may be regarded as out of touch with our time. But then, Holzner’s sense of time has never been confined to now.
Diane Dunbar - Curator of Fine Art Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery
Now in his early seventies, Holzner has sustained a level of commitment and belief in his work as a painter which, in today’s world, can seem a rare thing. It is inspiring to encounter an artist who, in spite of being, at times, a victim of the vagaries of fashion and art politics, produces work of great power and relevance to the world in which he lives. The way of life which facilitates this approach is one of discipline, borne of many years of hard work and experience of the intellectual, emotional and physical components of his art. Holzner continues to articulate his world view through his paintings with increasing confidence and strength as the years pass. |
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)