Starscape

He’s not the only handsome fellow in Zwerger’s studio. The place is crawling with more than 20 acrylic portraits of Bollywood’s high and mighty; Kareena Kapoor with her habitual haughtiness; Salman Khan with his crinkly charisma; Rajnikant with his animal magnetism. It was easy to paint Aamir Khan (“I nailed him in one stroke”) but Hema Malini was a different story because she has such a complex face,says the artist. He got their pictures off the net except for Amitabh Bachchan who he met at his Juhu residence.

The brush strokes are bold,almost vicious. The colour palette is striking with vivid majentas and audacious yellows. It’s easy to see that Zwerger is an artist who lives life in large,impulsive strides. Born in Innsbruck,Austria,in 1943,Zwerger wanted to become a jazz musician,studied dentistry instead and wound up as a painter when he bought painting tools for his mentally ill wife as part of her therapy in the early ‘90s.

He hit gold when a photograph of a portrait he’d done of Arnold Schwarzenegger wound up in his erstwhile manager Franz Weber’s house who was a friend of the Hollywood actor. “One day Schwarzenegger came to Weber’s house,picked up a random photograph that was lying around and got the shock of his life when he saw it was a portrait of himself,” laughs Zwerger. Shwarzenegger bought the painting in 1995. Since then,he’s been commissioned by many bigwigs like actor Danny DeVito,star tenor Luciano Pavarotti,rock music legend Keith Richards and Austrian Chancellor Franz Vranitzky.

On October 18,2003,Zwerger became the first artist whose paintings were taken to space in a Sojus TMA-3 carrier rocket under the control of cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri. Portraits of the first man in space,Juri Gagarin,Pavarotti and US Senator John Glenn were in outer space for 200 days. For the first time after their outing in space,they will be displayed at his exhibition in Mumbai along with our desi heroes.

Apart from jazz and painting,the third love of his life is children. He has four children of his own. When we ponder over the wide disparity in their ages,he obligingly explains that he’s been married four times. “I might not cut off my ears but I’m still an artist. People expect me to live naughtily,” is his impish comeback.

‘Myriad Moods’ at Jehangir Art Gallery from February 9-15