Biography
Michael Kravagna was born in Klagenfurt, Austria, in 1962 and studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in the 80s.
He received a one-year grant for Madrid in 1989. He has been living and working in Belgium since 1991.
1989 - Preis des Landes Niederösterreich
1999 - Bauholding Förderungspreis für Bildende Kunst (STRABAG ART AWARD)
2017 - Prix Emma du Cayla - Martin - Académie royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique.
Member Künstlerhaus Wien (Vienne)
Membre associé du Cercle Artistique de Luxembourg
The basic principle of Michael Kravagna’s painting is the exploration of its own elementary elements:
- materiality
- sensuality
- transcendence
- challenge to human perception.

The paintings are painted in layers over long periods of time and as a result appear to be magical protocols of their own history.

Many of his most recent works are each dominated by a dominant pictorial gesture: a line, a scratch, an evenly wiped surface, etc., which in ostentatious repetition dominate the formal structure of the painting.

The accompanying strict, almost ceremonial process of producing the paintings does not, however, have a restrictive effect, but rather unfolds an extremely effective variety of difference and repetition.

Since the beginning of his career as a painter, Kravagna has been experimenting with the composition of the painting medium and the organic transformation processes of the material.

These processes are similar to the development and decay in nature: growth and decay, formation and erosion. In his works, he reflects on such natural processes of transformation of matter, motivates, accelerates, radicalizes, or restores them.