THE ARTWORK

Felix Waske (born 1942, Austria)
Title: Journey to Soul (Reise ins Innere) – 6 – Getrenntes Paar
Technique: drypoint, aquatint, and soft ground etching
Paper dimensions: 33 × 34.5 cm (13 × 13 ½ in.)
Image dimensions: 15.5 × 19.5 cm (6 × 7 ¾ in.)
Edition: 100 copies, signed, dated, and numbered in pencil on Arches paper with wide margins. This is number 42/100.
Publisher: Edition Brusberg, Hanover
Printer: Radierwerkstatt Kurt Zein, Vienna

In this teeming etching, Felix Waske invites us on a vertiginous journey into the labyrinths of the human soul. The composition, saturated with hybrid figures and fragmented silhouettes, oscillates between grotesque visions and dreamlike reveries. The title Getrenntes Paar (Separated Couple) guides our reading: at the center of this constellation of figures and images emerges the echo of an intimate fracture, rendered as a hallucinatory fresco.

Two monumental figures stand at the edges of the sheet, guardians of an interior space where a multitude of visions come alive. Between them, the viewer encounters a succession of narrative fragments: distorted bodies, fantastical creatures, shards of lived experience seized like fleeting memories. The interplay between the incisive strokes of the drypoint and the colored highlights of the aquatint generates a visual vibration that lends the composition a dramatic intensity.

Here Waske succeeds in pushing the boundaries of printmaking: far from austere rigor, he transforms drypoint into a tool of psychological excavation, a graphic script where humor, pain, and poetry intermingle. This work reads like an inner cartography—a palimpsest of emotions and memories where the intimate is elevated to universal matter.

THE BIOGRAPHY

Born in Vienna in 1942, Felix Waske is an Austrian painter, draftsman, and printmaker whose graphic universe is distinguished by its symbolic intensity and narrative profusion. Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, he developed in the 1970s a distinctive visual language, marked by technical precision and a visionary imagination.

It was during this period that he created the cycle Kupferne Erzählungen (Copper Tales), of which this print is a part. Hand-pulled in Kurt Zein’s Viennese workshop, these works form a veritable engraved fresco, revealing Waske’s taste for proliferating figures, fragmented bodies, and interwoven narratives.

His art, heir to both Viennese Expressionism and Surrealist audacity, delves into the depths of the unconscious and the layers of collective memory. Grotesque figures, mythological beings, and everyday scenes coexist within a world that is equal parts satire and dream.

Today, Waske’s prints are held in numerous European public and private collections. They stand as testimony to the singular power of his oeuvre—transforming printmaking into a rare form of narrative and emotional language.