Tone Fink auf der Drawing Now, Paris 2020

For Tone Fink, this is the fundamental starting point for his incredibly diverse and often perplexing
body of work. Or as Hans Gercke, the long-standing director of the Heidelberg Arts Association,
very aptly puts it: .
“Tone Fink rummages around in the bizarre cabinet of curiosities of his catholic upbringing with its
pagan residues, suppressed sexuality, eagerly categorised sins and punishments, felix culpa, seven
sorrows, glorious wounds, precious blood, sweet heart of Jesus, Corpus Christi, Carnival, death
and the devil”.
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From his early days as an altar boy, his work (inspired by Hermann Nitsch and the poems of
Peter Turrini) has evolved through his creative ‘Papierverletzungen’ [paper injuries] phase, and his
fantastical sculptures with their sensual, tactile ‘neominimalistic’ elements, right through to functional
seating and cabinets.
Tone fink
One of his main aims is to expand the very definition of art by playfully combining various traditional
art forms – drawings elaborated into expansive sculptures, films or artistic performances. For many
years he has been combining graphics and sculpture in the creation of his paper sculptures.
In his 2011 work entitled ‘Tone mit Krone im Papiergewand’ [Tone, bearing crown and dressed in
papers], he even transformed himself into a paper sculpture – “Tone Fink the fictional persona”.
While there is a certain violence to Tone Fink's works characterised by ‘Papierverletzungen’
[‘paper injuries’] – in which he ‘hurts’ the paper by inflicting scratches, rips and holes – his books
show an entirely opposite highly sensitive approach to the medium. Indeed, Jan Tabor (winner of
2011 City of Vienna Award for Journalism) described him as:
“A surrealist medic who heals the wounds, seals over the holes or leaves them to rest. From the
shreds and tatters he creates something new.”
When writing about Fink's book ‘Weißbleich’ [‘white-pale’], the same commentator writes:
“Tone Fink reduces the magnificence of baroque mysticism to mere fragments and suggestions,
frequently transforms the apocalyptic into the paradisiacal – yet the ambivalence of the symbolism
remains intact.”
Tone Fink has also been producing and publishing books since the 1980s, which often contain
small collections of drawings, which, although they were created spontaneously, were collected
over a period of several months. He also enjoys adding his own artistic touch to existing drawings,
as in his 2008 works ‘Erotone Leibesübung’ [‘erotone gymnastics’] and ‘Tapiesbuch’ [‘Tapies’s
book’], the latter of which saw him transform a monograph by Catalan painter Antoni Tapies.
Here, as in all his works, his drawings reflect his wide-ranging interests, even extending as far as
botany and geography in his book ‘Sehstücke’ [‘viewing pieces’].