BRUNO GIRONCOLI

Born 1936 in Villach, lived and worked in Vienna. Bruno Gironcoli began training as a goldsmith in 1951 in Innsbruck, completing his education in 1956 graduated with an apprenticeship certificate. Between 1957 and 1962 Gironcoli studied Painting in the class of Eduard Bäumer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In 1977 Gironcoli got the professorship for Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, as successor to Fritz Wotruba. In 2003 he was the official Austrian representative at the 50th Venice Biennale. Gironcoli died on 19 February 2010 and was interred at Wiener Zentralfriedhof.

In Gironcoli’s artificial world, life is neither amusing nor indulgent. It reveals (often under the guise of humor and the naivety of a toy) the inscrutable seriousness of the death mask, which is the face of our world. (Monsignor Otto Mauer, Wort und Wahrheit, Issue 3, Herder Verlag, Vienna 1969)

A systematization of Gironcoli’s reduced repertoire of signs, which is based on recurring forms, some of them painted with stencils, allows their assignment to four areas: seed, fruit; eros, drive; mechanics, violence; life, death. (Arnulf Rohsmann, Bruno Gironcoli – Works on Paper, Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz 1990)

Bruno Gironcoli’s works are characterized by unmistakable originality, often moving beyond the traditional boundaries of sculpture. Inspired by his stay in Paris and influenced by artists such as Alberto Giacometti, Gironcoli developed a unique visual language that merges human forms with mechanical and biomorphic elements. After completing his apprenticeship as a goldsmith in Innsbruck, he studied at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna from 1957 to 1962. In 1977, Gironcoli succeeded Fritz Wotruba as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Gironcoli’s generation replaces classical stone sculpture and, through his work, represents a changed understanding of sculpture. (Angela Stief, Albertina Modern, 2024)