About Gerhard Fischer

The artistic and cinematographic work of Gerhard Fischer (1984–2024 and beyond), which includes several hundred paintings and large-scale charcoal drawings (subject: The Bathers), thousands of nude photographs, and photo montages focused on the flowering of the male androgynous body, as well as 673 hours of uncut video footage, constitutes a whole, wild, and organically grown body of work. This extensive oeuvre remains unpublished.

Website Maulbertsch-Fischer with selected paintings, drawings, and photo montages.

It is an Art Against the Currents of the Present Time

The works of the past, such as those by Jacopo Pontormo, Jean Broc, Edgar Degas, Pierre Bonnard, as well as works from the Far East, China (Wu wei: Non-action) and Japan, are referenced in my work. Inspired by my Asian partner (Choon Huat Koay), I spent 20 years exploring the magic of art and philosophy in ancient China.

My video essay Swan with Stardust (13:46:11), completed in 2020, concludes in Chapter 36 with a tribute to the Tao Te Ching (literally The Holy Book of the Way and Virtue), authored around 300 BCE or later in China. Three-quarters of the Tao Te Ching, written by Laozi, consists of 5000 rhymed characters. The structure of the text is aphoristic, reminiscent of Friedrich Nietzsche’s writing style; it extensively quotes folk wisdom in the Chinese language.

Wu wei: Non-action is the phrase coined by Laozi that I identify with. Through Wu wei, a transreal euphoria can be developed. The Tao, as a school of life art, would be the creation »not only of an emptiness, but of a subtlety, a gentle, slow quieting – like a vowel« (Roland Barthes).

Sinking into emptiness and returning to concealment, all of this contains no drama. Taoism invites us to reintegrate individual existence into the continuous flow of the great world process. Once we free the world from all the tools of the discerning mind and no longer constrict it according to the spasms of our desires, we are able to snuggle up to (the world).

As Zhuangzi states: »His movement is like water, his stillness like a mirror; he responds like an echo, dissolving as if he were not there, and quietly, as if he were pure.«

Gerhard Fischer’s Artistic and Cinematographic Works

Fischer's visual and cinematographic works form a non-heteronormative body of work. These works, in various aesthetic formats (painting, photography, photomontage, videography, publications, websites), establish a fireworks display of ars erotica as their core focus. They lay the foundation for an aesthetics of homoerotic libido.

Some of this work will endure—not forever, but for a long time. Such is the case with the video essay Swan with Stardust. The long-form film Swan is a manifesto for cinema that is saturated with education, skill, taste, literature, music, and painting.

Website for the video essay Swan with Stardust (German/English): http://www.gerhardfischerworks.eu/swn.html

Description of Gerhard Fischer's visual and cinematographic works: http://www.gerhardfischerworks.eu/pretty-bulges.html (German/English).

List of Gerhard Fischer's visual works: http://www.gerhardfischerworks.eu/pretty-bulges.html#fn6

Gerhard Fischer's publications: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=gerhard+fischer+daedalus&offset=1

Exhibitions on art and science conceived: http://www.gerhardfischerworks.eu/pretty-bulges.html#fn2

On September 7, 2023, Gerhard Fischer received the Honorary Badge for Art and Science from the Republic of Austria in a festive ceremony at the Künstlerhaus. The laudatory speech was delivered by philosopher Walter Seitter.

Gerhard Fischer