About The Artist

Born in 1943 in Vienna, Brigitte Thonhauser-Merk was fascinated by cubism and abstraction that she came to know during her first stay in France in 1957. As an auto-didact she won the first prize in 1962 in a competition organized in the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, accompanied with an invitation to participate in an exhibition at the Vienna Secession. After a pause of 30 years due to familiy reasons, she started a career as a painter with enthousiasm, taking painting lessons at the Vienna fine-art public school (Künstlerische Volkshochschule Lazarettgasse) and organizing exhibitions in Austria, France, Italy and Germany. Her work shows a great variety of styles: flowers in watercolour, gardens in oil, abstract compositions and phantastic landscapes in acrylic on canvas and grafics. She is a member of Artistes Indépendants and Arts-Sciences-Lettres in Paris where her paintings are regularly on display. Among several other awards, she received in France "La toile d'or" (golden canvas) of the Fédération Nationale de la Culture Francaise 2006 and 2010 and the golden medal of the Mérite Culturel Francais 2013. Her paintings appear in french art magazines like "Impressions d'artistes" and "La Gazette des Arts" and show her joy and love for life that she wants to transmit to the spectator. As for Delacroix, her credo is: "above all, a painting should be a feast for the eyes"....