Franz Xaver Ölzant

Franz Xaver Ölzant was born in 1934 in Oberzeiring, in the Austrian state of Styria. He studied sculpture at the Hochschule für angewandte Kunst in Vienna, now the University of Applied Arts, from 1955 to 1958, where Dutch Wikipedia names Hans Knesl as his teacher. Much later, from 1978 to 1982, he also studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

After his studies Ölzant lived and worked in Pfaffenschlag bei Waidhofen an der Thaya in the Waldviertel from 1958 to 1965. After years in Vienna he returned to the region in 1976, and its granite and diorite boulders became the main source of his work.

He took part in stone sculpture symposia, including the 1969 Symposion Europäischer Bildhauer in St. Margarethen im Burgenland, the Straße der Skulpturen in St. Wendel, Saarland, in 1971 and 1979, and symposia in Kawasaki and Hiroshima in Japan. His earlier, smaller bronzes were noted for biomorphic forms; his later works grew monumental and close to land art.

His best known work is the Basilika of 1994 on the Gudenusfeld near Waidhofen an der Thaya, 97 diorite boulders arranged in six curved rows recalling a five-aisled Roman basilica. Other works include Wolkenstein (1979) in St. Wendel, the Lyrischer Stein (1987) in the government quarter of St. Pölten, Die große Tafel at the Dominican church of Krems, O 21 at the state hospital in Horn, a fountain in the Arthur Schnitzler Park in Baden, the Trauernde war memorial in Pusterwald, and the altar of the new parish church of Kirchham (1998).

From 1986 to 2001 he was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, leading a master class. He received the City of Vienna Prize for sculpture in 1980, the Styrian Würdigungspreis for fine art in 1989 and the Lower Austrian Würdigungspreis for fine art in 2005.

Ölzant lived for decades in Pfaffenschlag bei Waidhofen an der Thaya, a village that gave him his material and much of his inspiration. Little about his private life has been reported publicly. Brandaktuell, summarising Kurier, named Jean Arp and Henry Moore among the sculptors he admired.

Ölzant died peacefully at his home in the Waldviertel on Thursday 15 October 2026. Carl Aigner, the long-serving director of the Lower Austrian state museums, passed the news to Kurier on behalf of the family. No cause of death was made public. Kurier's headline gave his age as 82, which does not match the 1934 birth year given by Kurier itself, the State of Lower Austria and ORF, so he was in his early nineties.

The State of Lower Austria issued an obituary the same day, and Governor Johanna Mikl-Leitner said he had created an unmistakable artistic language from the region's natural and cultural landscape. Funeral arrangements had not been reported.

Ölzant's large public works, above all the Basilika near Waidhofen an der Thaya, remain part of the landscape of the Waldviertel and of Lower Austria's cultural identity, and the state collections hold many of his works. Critics place him as an independent voice in Austrian sculpture of his generation, working away from the figurative tradition of Fritz Wotruba toward forms drawn from nature, ornament and archaic cultures.