Lot 301 D

After studying art in Munich and Vienna, Oskar Mulley lived in the Tyrolean town of Kufstein from 1918 to 1934 and, as a landscape painter, devoted his attention to his immediate surroundings. In contrast to the alpine-Romantic painting prevalent there, the pictures he created during this period are defined by a distinctive, atmospherically compact drama.
The mountain farmhouse towers up in front of the low mountain chain, still in shadow in the early-morning light. The pure materiality of the massive mountain rocks is aptly realised through a virtuoso palette-knife technique. The sheets drying on the line form the only sign of civilised life and, as dabs of paint, they correspond to the red geraniums hanging nearby. The shifting of the motif right to the edge of the large-format canvas draws viewers directly into the work - a skilful staging device the artist may have picked up during the brief period he worked as a theatrical painter. Here the colossal architecture metamorphically integrated into the landscape may stand as a heroic sign for the ostensible and ultimately illusory domestication of nature.