Vondal’s artistic oeuvre largely consists of works combining collage with pencil, colored pencils, and acrylics. Most of them are composed in pastel tones. His work additionally includes assemblages incorporating little stones and matchsticks, which he also used as a material for the small number of objects he created. The primary theme of his art is the erotic image, and it is to be found in one way or another in almost every one of his works. Under the influence of the 1968 erotic film Die Nichten der Frau Oberst (The Colonel’s Nieces), which represented a formative visual experience for Vondal, women are attributed an intense erotic presence in his art. They appear in the role of the “sex bomb” (“Sexbompe” in Vondal’s idiosyncratic German spelling) and are embedded within the context of specific subjects, such as the bedroom, island, horse, or music, which Vondal utilizes and stages again and again. A large part of his work represents a hybrid of image and text. This involves integrating the textual material into an initially pictorial medium. Our gaze is usually directed toward an image forming the main scene of the picture; this is surrounded by various depictions of scenes as well as texts, and these are integrated into a sea of different symbols, such as flowers and hearts. Here the artist introduces himself directly into the work by citing biographical elements, which he embellishes and expands upon. Vondal becomes a lover, husband, engineer, or prince as well as many other figures. He is in a romantic relationship with his stereotypical “sex bomb,” whom the text reveals to be a virgin, young, and pregnant. Vondal is a kind of director, whose primary focus is on depicting beautiful women and erotic content. If we look behind the scenes, where the textual level of his pictures sheds additional light, then another side of his work reveals itself. This conveys dreams and wishes, thematizes closeness to other people as well as relationships with them and points to his desire to get away in the form of a yearning for exotic places.

Karl Vondal was born in Obersiebenbrunn in the Lower Austrian district of Gänserndorf on April 6, 1953. He was the youngest child of a large family consisting of six sisters and two brothers. After completing his mandatory schooling, he began a three-year apprenticeship to become a bricklayer. Vondal quit training for this trade and then worked as an unskilled laborer in construction and the coal trade as a nineteenand twenty-year-old. This is the period when he became mentally ill, and he came to the “Mental Health and Care Facility at Gugging” for the first time at the age of nineteen. His artistic talent was discovered at “Gugging” in the eighties. During the period from that time until he moved into the “House of Artists” in 2002, Vondal established the basis for his artistic profession. The artist worked at the “House of Artists” as well as the atelier gugging from 2002 until his death on May 10, 2024.