Otto Beckmann
Otto Beckmann (1908–1997) was an Austrian sculptor and one of the pioneers of computer art. Born in Vladivostok, he came to Austria in 1922, when his family fled the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. He trained at the HTL Mödling and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, graduating in 1941, and from 1945 worked as an independent artist in Vienna, making sculpture, paintings, enamels, mosaics for residential buildings, and windows and doors for churches. He joined the Vienna Secession in 1951 and was awarded the title of professor in 1958. In the mid-1960s Beckmann turned to technology. In 1966 he founded ars intermedia, an experimental working group that brought him together with engineers at the Technical University of Vienna, among them Alfred Graßl, Gerd Koepf and his son Oskar Beckmann. With Graßl he made his first computer graphics, photographing images from a screen and transferring them to paper or offset aluminium plate. From 1969 Oskar built him an analogue studio computer, the a.i./70, which father and son refined until 1979; its program could be changed in real time, so artist and machine could work interactively. From 1970 to 1973 he also made computer-generated laser graphics with Koepf. Running through this work was Imaginäre Architektur (Imaginary Architecture), which Beckmann pursued from 1966 to 1980: visionary buildings designed purely on artistic grounds, first from Plexiglas models and later as façade-like designs and virtual three-dimensional objects generated on the studio computer, ending in 1980 with the series Metropolis 2080. Beckmann showed in the defining early exhibitions of computer art, including Tendencije 4 in Zagreb (1969) and the touring Impulse Computerkunst (1970), and had a solo exhibition of electronic computer art at the Vienna Secession in 1969. Peter Weibel called him "one of the pioneers of media and computer art." His work is held by the Albertina in Vienna, Neue Galerie Graz, Kunsthalle Bremen and ZKM Karlsruhe. His son Richard founded the Archiv Otto Beckmann in 2005 to look after the estate, and in 2026 Heike Werner Gallery in Munich presented Imaginary Architecture: Otto Beckmann & ars intermedia, 1968–1980.
3 physical works
