Gerhard Leixl

Gerhard Leixl was born in 1961 in Straß, Styria, and lives in Vienna. His first international career was in music, with the Vienna Boys' Choir, before he moved through every branch of the visual arts. He trained at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna under Maria Lassnig, Hubert Schmalix and C. L. Attersee, and later studied sculpture and conceptual art with Timm Ulrichs in Münster and Michelangelo Pistoletto in Vienna. He works across painting, sculpture, photography, video, installation and performance, much of it in public and social space, with projects at the Leopold Museum, the Museumsquartier Vienna and the National Art Gallery in Bangkok. Since the 1990s his practice has run alongside work in art and therapy — disability support, preventive youth work, drug aftercare — and since 2014 he has taught on the art therapy programme at the Sigmund Freud University in Vienna and Berlin.