Alfred Neumayr devoted himself to what he called “drawing nothingness,” an origin state he imagined as capable of becoming anything—a simple object, a mythic figure, or an entire universe—without ever collapsing into mere emptiness. A trained offset printer from Tulln, Lower Austria, he turned to art only after a burnout in 2005, eventually finding a daily working rhythm in Gugging’s open studio from 2011, where drawing became both occupation and quiet insistence.​

Working primarily with India ink and pencil on cardboard, canvas, and paper, Neumayr would begin at an arbitrary point and let the line wander until forms surfaced from a thicket of strokes. Over time, he developed a distinctive vocabulary of fine marks, varied pen pressures, and physical interventions—scratching, pricking, thinning—that made each surface feel both drawn and lightly carved.​

From a distance, these works suggest abstract, monochrome fields; up close, they resolve into aerial terrains, cosmic drift, and hybrid beings bearing suggestive titles like “Circe,” “Totem,” “Eve and Adam,” and the “Eronauts.” Shown at Galerie Gugging, Ricco/Maresca in New York, Drawing Now Paris, and in collections such as the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Neumayr’s drawings never settle into a single reading. They stage, instead, the moment when something first begins to take shape—a world emerging, line by line, from a charged and nameless before.