Klaus Wanker was born in Graz. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in the class of Sue Williams and Adi Rosenblum and Markus Muntean, as well as at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf with Siegfried Anzinger.

Klaus Wanker's work deals with a type of representation of nature that is located in the planned macro or micro-specific area. An abstract world that contains a layered sequence of organic and technoid geometric elements, with an attempt to explore boundaries through sharpness, blurriness and overlays. This creates model worlds that also point to larger spaces. The material used is bitumen, a waste product of the oil industry, shiny, fascinating and at the same time disturbing, harvested grasses and gesso. A controversy from an absolutely artificial fossil world to fragile nature.

The latest series Forgotten Memories extracts artifacts from spatial landscape memory. This includes both pictorial elements from the art historical field as well as private artifacts, which are transformed here and subject to a new, changed meaning through a change in perspective and the monochrome fossil painterly treatment.