MUNICH.- Max Weiler (1910–2001) was one of the most important and prolific European graphic artists of his generation.

In this exhibition, Max Weiler, who is firmly anchored in the public’s mind as a great painter, is shown for the first time to be an equally important graphic artist – an artist who, beginning around 1930, opened up an additional field of autonomous, creative self-exploration with his works on paper, and who – unerringly and obsessively – worked on an œuvre of outstanding importance right up to his death.

Despite international exhibitions, Weiler’s work has not received the attention of a larger public outside Austria that it deserves.

This exhibition shows a representative selection of some 80 works on paper that were on display in the Albertina in Vienna in the summer of 2011 as part of a much larger retrospective. The aim of the Munich exhibition is to capture the essence of Weiler, the graphic artist, and to trace the different phases of his development from the early Thirties to his late work.

To a great extent Max Weiler was an analytical and experimental artist who reflected the media he used. His graphic development took place in clearly distinguishable phases and leaps, in close analogy to his painting. His struggle to find his own form of expression within the context of international Modernism is articulated in the most varied of techniques he used until the early Sixties and in his small, homogenous groups of works. It was not until 1961, after finding a very personal path to follow in his own painting process – namely his trial sheets – that an uninhibited and meandering flow of drawings emerged: virtuoso works in ink from the Sixties, ranging from the abstract to the expressive, and the mature pencil and ink sheets of the Seventies that unfurled in unrestricted variations, climaxing in his monumental drawings.