Heidi Harsieber – Werner Kuntschik

Werner Kuntschiks’work is still largely unknown. In the 1960s he worked for a time in architectural offices in Zambia and South Africa, returned to Vienna and created an impressive oeuvre of paintings in just a few years until his death in 1972. He explored the styles and themes of his time, American Pop Art, the political statement, extreme figurations, bodies and faces, the grotesque in the style of Francis Bacon, with the demons of Kubin and Max Ernst in the background. In 1970, Werner Kuntschik met the Austrian photographer and artist Heidi Harsieber. Photos and photo experiments from their brief time together have survived, which Heidi Harsieber later edited and combined into series. She dedicated many of her works—including the large Epitaph für Werner Kuntschik—to his memory. In this volume, Heidi Harsieber brings together these photo series. At the same time, she documents the entire oeuvre of Werner Kuntschik, the result of years of painstaking research. After the memorial volume for her teacher Ernst Hartmann (2020), also published by SCHLEBRÜGGE. EDITOR, this publication is the second important homage that Heidi Harsieber has published, here in collaboration with Berthold Ecker, curator at the Wien Museum.

Heidi Harsieber has been present in the Austrian photographic art scene since the 1970s and has been able to confirm her position in recent years—including with a solo exhibition at the Francisco Carolinum Museum (2022) and an invitation from the State Gallery of Lower Austria in Krems for 2025.

“The artist performs his high-wire balancing act between mirror image and silver backing, a balancing act everyone should perform, and has done so, for everyone is an artist, or was once; indeed, art is nothing but a part of life: it is merely a means of development, a means to be born before one dies.” Werner Kuntschik