Helmut Ditsch

Biography

Let us begin with the method, because it explains the rest. Before painting a piece of landscape, Ditsch chooses it and walks there, often to a place unfit for habitation, and stays for at least several days. He himself said: “I am neither a photorealist nor a hyperrealist; I paint on the basis of what I have seen and experienced myself.”

He was born on 6 July 1962 in Villa Ballester, in the province of Buenos Aires. His grandparents had emigrated to Argentina from Austria, Germany and northern Italy around 1920. His mother died early, and the theme of life and death has occupied him ever since. At eight he first saw the Andes and the Pampas, and as a child he began painting as a self-taught artist. In 1983 he began working as a freelance artist, and in the same year his first solo exhibitions were held in Buenos Aires. Two years later, disillusioned with working with galleries, he gave up painting and turned to expeditions in the Andes: that was how he became an extreme mountaineer. In 1986 he returned to the canvas. He had started out with Surrealism, but his experience as a climber took him further and further from it. Formal education came late: in 1988 Ditsch moved to Vienna and entered the Academy of Fine Arts, where one of his main teachers was Ulrich Gansert. In 1990 he received the academy’s Master Class Award, and in 1993 he completed the course with honours. He studied, among other things, the old masters such as Caspar David Friedrich and Johannes Vermeer. He set up a studio near Vienna, and in Meran he met the mountaineer Reinhold Messner, with whom he has worked many times since. In 1995, to study glacial ice, he crossed the glaciers of Patagonia, and in 1998 he spent several weeks alone in the Austrian Alps, preparing the painting “Mountain Range” (Das Gebirge).

“Aconcagua”, “The Answer” and “K2” are held at the Messner Mountain Museum Firmian, “Perito Moreno” (2004) at the Messner Mountain Museum Ortles, and “Ötscher” (1998–2000) at the Lower Austrian State Museum in St. Pölten. Among other works are “Über dem Güßfeldt-Gletscher” (1993) and “Death Valley IV” (1996). They were shown at the Belvedere in Vienna (2002), at the Kunsthalle Krems (2003), and at the National Museums of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile (2001).

Critics argued over what to call him. At first they wrote of hyperrealism; later in Europe people began to speak of experimental realism, while Ditsch himself places his art in “lived realism” (Erlebter Realismus). It seems to me that the dispute was caused by the manner itself: what one sees on the canvases is not a photograph but the result of a long stay in a place.

Besides painting, he has worked as a designer of clothing, cars and aircraft, produced wine and lectured at universities. In 2000 he moved his studio to Ireland. In 2005 the monograph “The Triumph of Nature” by Carl Aigner was published (Prestel); in 2006 Ditsch presented the book at the 32nd Buenos Aires International Book Fair, and in 2009 a second monograph, “The Triumph of Painting”, appeared. In 2008 he founded a laboratory for art, music, philosophy and high-technology design, “Helmut Ditsch Fan Fabrica de Arte Nacional”, where the first sketches of the HD1 sports car were made. In 2010 he began a travelling exhibition, “Gira Nacional y Popular”, with free admission, in public city spaces: Santa Fe, Paraná, Rosario, Vienna, Mar del Plata and Mendoza. Since May 2012 his paintings have been on display at the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires. He became an honorary citizen of the General San Martín Partido (2010), received an honorary master’s degree from the National University of General San Martín, and won the Arturo Jauretche Cultural Award (2012). In June 2016 Ditsch recorded his first music album, “Del Final de los Tiempos”: he is the author of the music and lyrics, sings and conducts the orchestra. He explains that colour has a tonal frequency, and so every painting is for him a musical score. In 2017–2018 he painted “Perito Moreno” on a canvas two by twelve metres, the largest of his career; the painting was acquired by the Austrian foundation HPH Privatstiftung. Since 2018 he has been making an autobiographical film.