Private View: Thursday 20 September, 7-9pm

This is the first retrospective in the UK of the artist Hugo ‘Puck’ Dachinger and will feature paintings from the Martin Suppan Gallery in Vienna, drawings and a work from internment on loan from private collections.

After completing a degree at the School of Arts and Crafts in Leipzig, Dachinger worked as a designer, inventor and artist in Germany and Austria. In 1938 he escaped the Anschluss and came to London where he lived until his death in 1995. While he is best known for works completed during his internment on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien, he achieved great success during the war when he exhibited with artists such as Picasso and Kokoschka in West End galleries. Dachinger represented, with his fellow exiled artists, the idea of an international artistic language of modernism.

Dachinger’s drawings also present a unique portrait of London and its inhabitants from the point of view of an exiled Austrian. Away from the country of his birth Dachinger found a new home amongst the émigré community in Hampstead. He would often sit for hours in neighborhood cafes sketching the people around him.

Dachinger’s work is presented in the collections of English museums such as the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and the Manx Museum, Isle of Man as part of the national heritage. This exhibition seeks to highlight Dachinger’s pioneering role in exile art and to highlight a significant protagonist in the history of Austrian art.

The exhibition is curated by Vanessa Fewster (ACF London).