Oswald Oberhuber followed a pattern of surprising new beginnings in his artistic career.
From 1945 to 1949 Oberhuber studied sculpture at the Bundesgewerbeschule Innsbruck. Afterwards he was a student of Fritz Wotruba at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and of Willi Baumeister at the Academy in Stuttgart. In 1972 Oberhuber was the Austrian representative at the Venice Biennale. In 1977 Oberhuber participated in Documenta 6 and in 1982 in Documenta 7. In 1973 he was appointed professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, of which he was a member until his retirement in 1998.
Oberhuber is not only one of the first informal artists in Austria, but by translating these principles from painting into his concept of informal sculpture he has also made a unique contribution in an international context. These works are usually realized as three-dimensional spatial drawings made of plaster, wire and other sensitive materials. They stand in radical contrast to the canonical vocabulary of modernism and post-cubist sculpture of the time.
At the height of Informalism, Oberhuber ended this phase in the mid-fifties and began to work realistically. With this he made the first of many artistic leaps that would shape his work from that moment on.
