Linda Wolfsgruber: Austria Illustrator

I have a particular desire to put something new into each book.

Linda Wolfsgruber

Born in Bruneck, Italy in 1961, Linda Wolfsgruber attended art school in St. Ulrich in Gröden in Italy, trained as a typesetter and graphic designer, and then studied at Scuola del Libro in Urbino, Italy before beginning to work as a freelance graphic artist and illustrator in 1983. Since 1984, she has been illustrating full time in both Bruinico and Vienna and teaching at the Scuola d'illustrazione di Sarmede since 1996.

Wolfsgruber brings the printmaker and typesetter's sensibilities to her illustrations, using etching and dry point to work delicately in black and white, combined with a wash of colors, remarkable for their unusual spatial perspectives and their surprising emphasis on ordinary objects. She often plays with shifts in perspective and size distortion to imbue a story with emotional realism. Each book is fresh, and Wolfsgruber experiments freely.

In analyzing the art of Linda Wolfsgruber, editor Franz Lettner compared her oeuvre to "A land full of sensations and wonders—that also applies to Linda Wolfsgruber's picture worlds in which great narrative sophistication, a high level of crafting skills and an outstanding talent to give the appropriate form to each content manifest themselves … All these pictures show that fear and joy, lust and aggression, comedy and tragedy, too, are weighed in this playroom space between freedom and adjustment, between that which is familiar and that which is unknown. Whenever space is given to or taken from the figures, when they are sheltered by colors and shapes and lines or when they remain abandoned, emotions are set free."

Wolfsgruber's books have been translated into more than 15 languages and she has won numerous awards including the Austrian Prize for Children's and Teen Literature for Illustration, the Josef Binder Award for Illustration, and the Golden Apple of the Biennial of Illustration.

She currently lives in Vienna and leads workshops in schools and cultural institutions in Europe and abroad. In addition to illustrating children's books, she designs book covers and CD covers, creates illustrations for newspapers and magazines and even plans frescoes for public spaces.