Erich Brauer

Erich Brauer was born on 4 January 1929 in Vienna, Austria. He worked and exhibited under the name Arik Brauer and became a co-founder of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, an Austrian postwar movement built around densely worked figurative and fantastical imagery. Over his career he received a series of Austrian state and civic honors, including the City of Vienna Prize for Visual Arts in 1979, the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, First Class, in 2002, the Golden Decoration of Honour for Services to the State of Vienna in 2011, the Amadeus Austrian Music Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2015, and the Grand Decoration of Honour in Gold for Services to the Republic of Austria in 2018, followed by the Fritz Csoklich Prize in 2019.

He died on 24 January 2021 in Vienna at the age of 92, according to reporting from Austrian public broadcaster ORF carried by the Associated Press, which stated that he died "surrounded by his family." He is buried in an honorary grave at the Vienna Central Cemetery.

Documented detail on Brauer's formal art training could not be independently verified from primary sources available for this profile and is left unconfirmed here rather than assumed.

Brauer's exhibition history places him inside major European and American institutions during his lifetime, including a graphic retrospective at the Albertina in Vienna in 1974, a showing at the Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna in 1976, an exhibition at The Jewish Museum in New York in 1978, and a world-traveling exhibition that ran from 1979 to 1983. Coverage at the time of his death, including The Jewish Chronicle's description of him as a "multifaceted Viennese artist," reflects a critical reputation built as much on his range, spanning painting, printmaking, and public honors, as on any single body of work.

The clearest documented auction result located for this profile is a EUR 21,120 sale (including buyer's premium and Austrian VAT) for a lot recorded only as Lot 0026 at Im Kinsky in Vienna, in the house's 99th "Zeitgenossen" auction. The work's exact title and the calendar date of that sale could not be confirmed from the available source material. Other identified secondary-market results, including sales at Dorotheum for EUR 750 and EUR 2,340 and a mixed lot of six etchings at Van Ham for EUR 1,188, sit well below that figure and suggest a market that trades in modest, inconsistent increments rather than one with a clearly established price ladder. This profile does not claim the EUR 21,120 result as a confirmed world auction record, only as the highest price identified in available records as of this writing.

There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne for this artist, and this profile treats the "prints-only" or "full" categories as unsupported by current sources. Buyers should expect to verify individual works through the artist's representing galleries, currently identified as West Chelsea Contemporary and Kovacek & Zetter in Vienna, rather than through a centralized reference catalogue. The name itself is a source of real confusion in the market: auction houses and databases render the artist as "Erich (Arik) Brauer" or "Arik (Erich) Brauer," and this civil name is also shared, coincidentally, with an unrelated German-Jewish ethnographer (1895 to 1942) who has no connection to this artist or his market. Given the thin and uneven auction data described above, collectors should treat any single sale result as an isolated data point rather than a stable benchmark.