The famous international painter and performance artist Helmut Schober (* 1947) has focused for the past 40-odd years on the vortex and its intercultural content. Over the decades the vortex has remained a constant in his oeuvre, always supported by his main preoccupations of depicting and making tangible light, time, space and cosmos.

The qualities ascribed to the vortex include, amongst others, the constant cyclical continuity of life, triggered by the continuous rotation, as well as fate and fear. We feel ourselves to be subjected to a power which we cannot influence. Today’s world, its conflicts, the unfair distribution of property and economic decline, the resulting fear and the unpredictability of the future ‒ all these are merged into the metaphor of the vortex. This attractively designed volume visualises the vortex in numerous illustrations. It captures the viewer in its swirling maelstrom and prompts emotions.