About

Ingrid Grillmayr is an Austrian painter who works exclusively in oil on canvas. Her practice moves between Dornbirn in Vorarlberg and China, and this life between the Alps and the East Asian metropolis has become the quiet engine of her work — audible in its palette, visible in its scale.

Trained at the Bildnerische Erziehung in Feldkirch from 1977 to 1982, she went on to teach fine art in schools across Vorarlberg for nearly two decades. In 2000 she left the classroom to devote herself entirely to painting — a decision she describes less as a departure than as a homecoming.

“Oil is the perfume of my canvases.”

Her path into painting began with the rose: years of close, almost scientific study of its anatomy — petal, calyx, thorn. From this botanical discipline grew a body of work that turned toward the erotic, toward skin and gesture, until the figure itself began to loosen. In her recent canvases, bodies dissolve into pure colour; what remains is movement, temperature, breath.

Her touchstones are the churning painterliness of Cecily Brown, the carnal generosity of Rubens, and Michelangelo’s insistence on the body as the measure of all form. Between these poles she has found her own register — sensual yet disciplined, abstract yet never bloodless.

Ingrid Grillmayr lives and works in Dornbirn, Austria, and in China.