Othmar Trost grew up in a traditional family in Matrei in East Tyrol. His mother was the local midwife, his father a mountain guide and enthusiastic amateur painter, his brother a passionate photographer. Although the financial means remained modest, the house was always an open one, a hub for local solidarity and a place for outsiders to meet and socialize. It was in this environment that Othmar soon acquired his keen perception and open-mindedness towards new things. This environment, deeply connected to his homeland of Tyrol, gave Othmar the desire to paint at an early age. He soon discovered the talent within him, but initially did not have the courage to pursue a career as a visual artist. The fear of failure still stood in the way of the sensitive young man. He therefore completed an apprenticeship as a watchmaker, during which he honed his precision engineering skills and patience. In his free time, he painted incessantly. But it wasn’t just the landscape of his alpine surroundings, the mountains, peaks and valleys. People with all their facets, the figurative, are and always have been a major theme in the painter’s work. Othmar developed a great passion for photorealism and thus for the working greats Gottfried Helnwein and Gerhard Richter.
An encounter with Anton Lehmden (Vienna School of Fantastic Realism) had a lasting effect on Othmar Trost. He decided to devote himself to his vocation, to follow his passion for painting in its entirety and to receive the appropriate artistic and technical training. He therefore attended the Faber-Castell Academy in Nuremberg. He also came into contact with abstract painting through his teacher there.
In Vienna, Othmar Trost met Gunther Damisch, and it was an extraordinary encounter. The professor invited Othmar to take part in the group discussions of his painting class at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. It was another important step in the artist’s development. Thanks to the support of a local patron, the family’s family doctor, the economic start was secured. The artistic path had finally been chosen.
Today, Othmar Trost has set up the studio in his parents’ house in Matrei, which he has left unchanged. For him, it is still the place where he comes from and which grounds him, the center of his life. There he creates expressive paintings of the alpine surroundings of his homeland. The style, like the artist himself, is committed to tradition. As a balance to nature, Othmar Trost has people as a theme in his work. He has been fascinated by the character of individuals since his youth. This is probably due to the fact that his parents’ house was always a local communication center where many different people came and went. In the style of photorealism, he portrays real and fictitious personalities in large-format pictures.
Tyrolean painting has always been closely linked to history and the mountains that characterize the region. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the dawn of modernism, great painters such as Egger-Lienz, Alfons Walde, Oskar Mulley, Arthur Nikodem, Wilhelm Nikolaus Parchensky and Herbert Danler have left their mark on Tyrolean landscape painting in recent decades and captured it in wonderful works of art. In Othmar Trost we find a great, extraordinary protagonist of contemporary, expressive mountain painting. He knows how to transform traditional Tyrolean art into contemporary art like almost no other artist. In each of his paintings, he shows his connection to his surroundings, his love of his homeland, paired with a cosmopolitan character. His landscapes thus appear timeless and modern.