Jakob Gasteiger, born in 1953 in Salzburg, lives in Vienna and in the Weinviertel / Lower Austria. He is one of the most important Austrian painters and is considered a representative of analytical painting. In his works he questions the parameters of painting and thematizes, expands and breaks through the boundaries of graphics, painting and sculpture.

The most extensive and at the same time best-known group of the artist's works are his mostly monochrome pictures with relief-like structures, which are depicted by using a comb spatula when applying the paint on the picture's background.

Within this working process, Gasteiger does not use paint as a carrier of content or meaning, but as a material per se. The colour material serves the artist to investigate questions of colour materials and the boundaries between non-colour to colour, of material, colour and colourfulness.

The comb spatula is Gasteiger's tool. It replaces the brush and, as he himself emphasizes, enables the artist to work without personal handwriting in the sense of a mechanical process.