Emil Rizek - "Village at the Harbor in Holland"1963

Emil Ritzek 1901-1988.
was actually supposed to join his father's company as an electrical engineer. Following his talent, he took painting lessons from Anton Hlavacek. His meeting with Carl Fahringer in 1923 was a groundbreaking move for his future career. Inspired by this, Emil Rizek undertook his first travels. His desire to visit foreign countries was to accompany him throughout his life and took him to Indonesia, Japan, South Africa and even Hawaii. In America he met his first wife, Dorothy Risdale Grove. Although he repeatedly returned to his native Austria, Emil Rizek initially gained artistic recognition and the opportunity to present his pictures to a wider audience mainly abroad. It was only after the Second World War that he managed to get a job that would provide financial support for his family and show his works at numerous exhibitions. In 1960 his oeuvre was honored in a major retrospective at the Vienna Künstlerhaus. He was subsequently awarded the title of professor. In 1965, Emil Rizek received the Great Golden Medal of Honor from the State Association of Lower Austrian Art Societies. The preferred place of residence during his final years was East Frisia, where after his death in 1988 his urn was buried off the coast of the Wadden Sea.
On his travels through Europe, it was primarily Holland and the "School of The Hague" - of which he later called himself a member - that became important for the stylistic development of Emil Rizek's painting. This Dutch equivalent of French Impressionism was very much in line with Emil Rizek's painterly approach due to its more emotional and intuitive painting style. The living tradition of the old masters is combined in The Hague with the feeling for color, form and movement of the French Impressionists. In his selection of themes from the working-class and peasant milieu, the artist is in the continuity of Dutch genre painting and the great French painters of the late 19th century: these are the same themes that Emil Rizek also takes up again and again in his work - motifs from everyday life in the suburbs, the hustle and bustle in the streets, on the markets and squares, in the exotic Far East or in a modern European city. Bron Kovacek&Zetter, Vienna