Franz Kempf
Franz Kempf AM (born 1926) is an Australian artist.
Kempf was born in Melbourne and studied at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School and in Italy and Austria. In England he worked as a film designer with Richard Macdonald and was associated with Peter Blake, Joe Tilson, Ceri Richards and Keith Vaughan. Vaughan had an influence on Kempf’s work of the 1960s.
Kempf has worked with and in a variety of media, styles and methods including paint, print, etching, lithograph, monotype, screenprint, textile and woodcut.
Professor Sasha Grishin has described him as
...an artist whose work presents both a striking continuity throughout a career which has stretched over half a century, and he is an artist whose work presents evidence for constant rejuvenation and reinvention. As a humanist, the concern for man lies at the centre of his universe and the dilemma of being is the central preoccupation. However, the human presence in Kempf’s art is not something which is treated as unproblematic, something to be recorded and to be described literally. For Kempf to be human is something to be celebrated and the artist adopts an ethical stance in his defence of human dignity. Throughout a series of metaphors, symbols and allegories in a sombre and profound manner he commemorates the miracle of being and condemns all that is oppressive and coercive.
As a humanist and as a spiritual and religious artist, Kempf has chosen a path which has not been popular with many of his Australian peers. Yet with time as the various fads and fashions pass, Kempf’s art today appears increasingly fresh, vital and relevant to the issues of the present time.
He was Senior Lecturer in printmaking at the University of South Australia from 1973 to 1981 and has been a Guest Lecturer at the Slade School of Fine Art, the University of London, the Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland; Gloucester College of Art, United Kingdom and has participated in over 90 one man invitation exhibitions in America, Israel, Germany, Poland and China.
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