Heinz Goll


Hannes Heinz Goll was an Austrian sculptor, printmaker and painter, who worked predominantly in Colombia.

Life and work

Goll was the son of Johanna and Rudolf Goll, an upper-middle-class family with three children from Klagenfurt. He was considered an enfant terrible of the Austrian art scene in the 1960s, was co-founder of the "Grüne Galerie" in his hometown in 1964, and established the art collective of Mieger in 1970. He also established a rehabilitation workshop for drug addicted adolescents in Carinthia, and treated them with a self-developed art therapy, before he moved to Caracas in the mid 1970s, where he founded a further rehabilitation group.
A few years later he moved to Colombia, where he met his future wife, the psychologist Piedad Tamayo in Sibaté, and settled down to live. In his works he was inspired by pre-Columbian symbolism and Indigenous arts. In many of his works, especially in his nude madonna works, he combined sacred and erotic items. Other topics of his work include: chained indigenous people, people on the run and politically displaced persons of Colombia. Shortenly before Goll exhibited in his hometown in the end of 1998, physicians diagnosed that he was suffering from leukemia and hepatitis C. A few days later he died in the hospital of Sibaté near Bogota, the town where he is buried.

Famous works