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(1902-1974)
On September 26th, 1902, Anton Mahringer, the third of seven children, was born in Neuhausen on the Fildern near Stuttgart. Two years later, the Mahringer family moved to Schwäbisch Gmünd, where his father got a job as a teacher at the trade school and technical college for goldsmiths. His father’s teaching position made it possible for him to be artistically active in painting courses during his high school years. Because his father was rather averse to his son’s wish of wanting to be an artist, after graduating from high school, the young Mahringer initially entered the Stuttgart customs office. However, he suffered a knee injury in a sports accident, which resulted in multiple operations and eventually a lifelong stiff leg. Therefore, he had to change his education and started an apprenticeship in banking, which he completed in 1924. In the same year, Mahringer enrolled at the Stuttgart School of Applied Arts, to prepare for admission to the Stuttgart Art Academy, which he passed successfully in 1925. He first became a student of Prof. Arnold Waldschmidt until in 1928 he was finally able to enroll in the class for painting, which Anton Kolig had just been appointed to from Nötsch in Carinthia. In 1928, when Anton Mahringer first came to Carinthia together with his teacher Anton Kolig during an excursion from the Stuttgart Academy, his artistic intention was still primarily to capture the human body. However, the landscape of the Gail valley with its distinctive mountain formations and its own special lighting conditions had a lasting fascination for the young painter.
In 1929, when Kolig received an order for a series of frescoes for the Klagenfurt ”Landhaus”, Anton Mahringer became his most important employee. In 1932, Mahringer finally moved into the Gail valley. In the same year, he married Regina Peschges, also a student of Anton Kolig. In 1939, Mahringer took on a position as a drawing teacher at the secondary school in Hermagor for the duration of the war. In 1948, he received the Austrian State Prize for Painting for his work “Abendlandschaft” (Evening landscape). Public contracts such as the “Portrait of Anton Kolig” and the mosaic for the Austrian Drau power plants in Klagenfurt followed. In 1956, Mahringer and his family moved into a new house with a studio in the center of St. Georgen in the Gail valley. From the window and balcony of this studio there was a magnificent view of the Carinthian landscape, which the artist cherished. The distinctive profile of the Dobratsch mountains in the east, the view of the Gail valley with the silhouettes of the Carnic and Julian Alps and the fruit trees of his garden with the St. Georgen village school and church in the background offered a treasure of shapes, from which Mahringer often drew. Anton Mahringer died on December 29th, 1974 in the Villach hospital.
