Notes on my biography
I was born in Innsbruck on January 1, 1947, the first child of the year to be born in postwar Austria. The Mayor came after I was born to offer his congratulations and brought with him a savings account book with 100 schillings on it. A radio broadcaster pinched my big toe and transmitted my cries to the entire nation of Austria.
My mother, Leopoldine Schober, née Sauerzapf, was sent to Innsbruck as punishment because, as the daughter of a socialist union leader, she refused to join the Nazi party. My father, Richard Schober, had survived imprisonment in the infamous “Le Vernet” internment camp in the Pyrenees. The German Wehrmacht stationed him in Innsbruck, where he met and married my mother. One of the countless fortunes of war.
My father was born in the Tommelehof in Völs am Schlern, in South Tyrol. This hamlet of only 30 souls produced seven artists over two generations. A cluster of artists, artists and sculptors.
Towards the end of World War II our family was bombed out twice. Innsbruck was heavily bombed before I was even born, and the ruins were everywhere. Even after the “final victory”, our family was still living in one commandeered room with a kitchenette. When I was three years old, my parents sent me and my brother Richard to our grandmother in Vienna. I was later described as a quiet child who usually sat by a window, drawing deer and other animals, flowers and much more besides. The changing sunlight falling on the white tiles in the kitchen enchanted me in that gray confinement that always stank of coal.
When I was five, our parents brought us back to Innsbruck. At the Pradl grade school, drawing was my favorite subject. I drew and drew and drew… Other subjects interested me only marginally.
In 1957, when I was ten years old, my father died from the after-effects of his internment in “Le Vernet”.
My years at intermediate school were difficult. A large number of our teachers were rehabilitated Nazis, all strict and oppressive. I was eventually booted out.
High school was no better; pistols, knuckle-dusters and daggers were passed around under the benches during lessons. I nevertheless passed the entrance exam for teacher training college.
There, Prof. Walter Berger, my art teacher, urgently advised my mother to allow me to study at the Academy in Vienna. At the general grades conference he declared that there was nothing he could teach me and that I was capable of more than he was himself. There was still one obstacle, however. My RE teacher tried to persuade my mother not to allow me to study in Vienna “because I would, of course, become completely depraved there.” My mother had other ideas. She sent me to the artists who were known in the city, showed them my portfolio and had them confirm their opinions in writing. The reports were all positive. She then bought me a large paint box. My path to Vienna was finally clear.
There is not a great deal to be said about my studies in Vienna. The teaching was conservative, reactionary even, and I soon realized that there was not much for me to learn there.
Then suddenly, a ray of light shone down into my life. Without any knowledge of Italian, I was given a vacation job as a tour guide in Senigallia, a little town on the Adriatic coast. While I was there, I painted landscapes. One day, while comparing tubes of paint at a little old paint dealer’s, a gray-haired man sitting next to the cash register asked what kind of things I painted. I showed him a watercolor. He was the world-famous art photographer Mario Giacomelli. I had found my master.
Many sojourns in Senigallia were to follow. Giacomelli was a great teacher, slow to criticize and quick to praise. He encouraged me and helped me to believe in myself. On his advice I moved to Milan, where I was received with open arms by the local artists. A number of them, not least Emilio Isgrò, even introduced me to their collectors. What generosity, what freedom!
I completed my studies as quickly as possible, at what was then the College of Applied Arts and is now the University of Applied Arts, and was even awarded a distinction.
In Milan I staged my first performances with miniature sculptures between 1973 and 1977. The dimension of time started to interest me, and I attempted to isolate a psychological concept of time. In my performance Glasstück, for example, the apparently long passage of time before the panes of glass finally shatter is compressed into less than five minutes.
My mother died in 1977, the same year in which I was invited to documenta 6 in Kassel.
A figurative period followed, in which my work explored the forces of space, the human body and the conflict between light and darkness. From this period onwards, light increasingly became a central element of my work. In the years that followed, I painted the large-format Zarathustra Cycles I–X and, between 1997 and 2005, the Mozart Cycles. In 2002, my work was presented alongside Turner’s in the exhibition Turner and Schober. Two Creators of Light at Bury Art Museum in Manchester, in collaboration with Tate Britain, London.
It was very difficult for me to invent a suitable medium for the kind of painting that I had in mind. Innumerable attempts were necessary in order to make my canvases glow and shimmer and to draw the viewer in. Initially in black-and-white, then monochrome and finally polychrome, they have remained this way right up to the present day. Paints and emulsions needed to be specially produced for the purpose because the kind of mixtures I require are not available in the shops.
However subtle and sophisticated a painting technique is, it is pointless if it is not backed up by a vision and by intuition. Great perceptive capacity, great compositional ability and the drive to work.