Hannah Winkelbauer is a visual artist based in Vienna, Austria. Born in Vienna in 1987, she grew up there and studied painting and cultural studies at the Kunstuniversität Linz, Austria, and at the Accademia di Belle Arti Bologna, Italy.

In her paintings and drawings, she references what is often invisible or ignored while documenting reality. She is interested in the story behind the realistically depicted motif. Her pictures have been regularly exhibited nationally and internationally since 2006.

Her last solo exhibition was in 2020 at the Angerlehner Museum in Thalheim, Austria who now own two of her works. Some of her art is also in the possession of the Hofburg in Vienna and the collection of the province of Upper Austria. She currently lives and works in Vienna.

Found objects form the basis for the works in the "finds" series. Lost objects on the side of the road, dead animals on the sidewalk or in the forest, withered flowers or rotting vegetables: objects that are usually ignored are ennobled here as works of art.

Winkelbauer is interested in looking at the beautiful behind the "ugly" surface, the attractive under a repulsive shell. She works finely and precisely with colored pencils, cut out the motifs and then stick them slightly raised on a white background in object frames.

Her use of composition and neutral background creates associations with showcases or scientific illustrations. The images are documentary and narrative at the same time. Themes such as transience, ecology and the aesthetics of everyday life resonate, each and every viewer can create their own story and interpretation of the pictures.

"Winkelbauer allows us to recognize the beauty in the inconspicuous and the everyday - also in the discarded and morbid, in a carelessly crumpled sheet of paper as well as in a half-rotted apple or in any vegetable," as curator Günther Oberhollenzer put it in his opening speech to the exhibition "Still lives", in the Stadtgalerie Vöcklabruck in February 2016. And further: "Drawing as compression, as concentration of our world and reality of life."

Untitled, Rabbit, 2020

Coloured pencil on paper

700mm x 900mm

Untitled, Pigeon, 2020

Coloured pencil on paper

600mm x 500mm

Untitled, Robin, 2015

Coloured pencil on paper

300mm x 300mm