Helmut kohler biography
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Helmut Koller
2010
The Contemorary Figurative Creature Movement, Dumonteil Galerie Impress, CHINA
2009
Festwochen Austellung, Rudolf Budja Gallery, City, AUSTRIA
2006
From Concealed Walls, Beacon Center endorse the Study, Tequesta, FL, US
2004
The Medal Beach 5, Lighthouse Center for interpretation Arts, Tequesta, FL, US
2003
Palm Street Cover Studios Musical 2002, Westerly Palm Lido, FL, US
2002
Soho Arts Southward, Palm Seashore, FL, US
Palm Street Divulge Studios Confer 2002, Westbound Palm Bank, FL, US
2001
Soho Arts Southeast, Palm Lido, FL, US
Shared Visions Veranda, Boca Raton, FL, US
2000
Palm Street Set out Studio Luminous 2000, Westmost Palm Lakeshore, FL, US
1999
Galleria di Sorrento, Las Vegas, NV, US
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How the artist taught himself to paint and became the sole member of an art movement that he dubs Kollerism.
A purple cheetah, an electric-blue bison, a shimmering green tiger — it’s easy to mistake Helmut Koller’s paintings for naturalist psychedelia: animals on acid! But the Austrian-born artist — now living an unlikely, peripatetic life between Vienna and Palm Beach, Florida — mainly fell into this style of portraiture as a way to go wild with color. The 65-year-old self-proclaimed leader and sole member of an art movement that he dubs Kollerism has zero formal training in the medium. Indeed, he found his way via trial and error (and by asking technical questions of more established artists whom he met at Floridian cocktail parties along the way).
Koller is both a plucky autodidact and a confident entrepreneur, unafraid to acknowledge that art is a business as well as a passion. And he’s a testament to he possibility of reinventing oneself from scratch; the artist didn’t start painting in earnest until his mid-thirties, after spending his teens and twenties as a professional opera photographer. Early on, he leaned hard on art-historical precedents — Egon Schiele chief among them — before cementing his own unique, brilliantly tinted vision. Here, Koller discusses his
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Behind The Animal Portraits By This Palm Beach Artist
Painter Helmut Koller poses in his West Palm Beach studio.
In Helmut Koller’s world, zebras have red stripes and a bear wears a deep purple coat. The antlers of an elk glow neon teal while a midnight-blue panther stalks his prey. There’s also an alert green tiger, an electric-blue monkey and a rabbit whose flame-colored fur burns red, yellow and hot orange.
These rainbowed species are the subjects of Koller’s acrylic paintings, which combine realism and abstraction through technical form and imaginative color. A trained photographer, the self-taught painter of the past 20 years has completed enough portraits from his West Palm Beach, Florida, studio to fill a zoo–“from the fly to the rhino,” he laughs.
Born in Austria, Koller started his career in 1974 as the official photographer of the Vienna State Opera, regularly capturing the likes of Luciano Pavarotti, Franco Zeffirelli and other greats. But seven years in, the early 20-something needed a change. “I just got cocky and bored,” he admits. “Having Leonard Bernstein as part your daily life, I thought I needed a greater challenge.” He moved to New York at the end of 1981 and found work shooting for TV Guide and German magazines.
But Koller’s stint in the Big Apple d