Bernhard Gaul profiles Austrian painter Max Weiler (1910 -2001). Gaul recalls that visiting an a 1980's exhibition of Weiler's work and hearing him talk "was the first time painting was revealed to me as an attitude, and as a physical experience."

Recalling a visit to an 2004 exhibition of Weiler's large scale paintings, Gaul writes: "exposure appears also as a core element in the way they are painted. In their essence they are hardly wilfully constructed nor are they first of all outpourings of inner conditions. Instead they appear like subtle responses to something external, although translated through the painter: Nature in many parts, or fragments of it. They are also generous, or better: expansive, providing a surface that allows for a stretching (of the soul?) like across a desert, ice, the sky – or indeed the sea."