Herwig Zens

The impressive biography of the artist Herwig Zens, who was born in Himberg near Vienna, bears witness to his formative influence on the Austrian cultural landscape. In parallel with his career as a professor of art education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, he produced an extensive oeuvre that earned him international acclaim. In his work, Zens most notably tested the technical limits of printmaking. He succeeded, for example, in printing his etched diary on a 40-meter-long roll of paper. Thanks to the generous donations of Gerda Zens and Johannes Scheer, the State Collections of Lower Austria hold not only, since 2020, several versions of the etched diary, but also Zens's complete printed oeuvre and an extensive archive covering the work of the artist, who died in 2019. To mark his anniversary year in 2023-Herwig Zens would have been 80-the State Collections
of Lower Austria are honoring the artist with this collection catalog, which is devoted to subjects
that Zens pursued throughout his life: death, the dance of death, Francisco de Goya, and the etched diary.