Erich Gruber was born in 1971 in Schwarzach/Pongau, Austria. He lives and works in Salzburg. From 1995 to 2001 he attended the Hochschule Mozarteum in Salzburg, class Dieter Kleinpeter.

The curator from the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Tina Teufel, illuminates the works of Erich Gruber with the following sentences:

"Although painting dominated his work at first and recently textile works also belong to his means of expression, drawing is a constant and important companion in the artistic work of Erich Gruber and, in my opinion, his most impressive profession. With them he takes up again the thread of his long-standing fascination for the morbid and transient, for animals and especially insects, and makes them an interface between figuration and abstraction. It is not only the dimensions of his drawings, which now go beyond the previously customary small sheet size, that fascinate me most, but above all his use of the pencil: The drawings approach photorealistic representations in a virtuoso manner, repeatedly flirting with the abstraction to which he dedicated his first comprehensive group of works in 2011, and on closer inspection offer the entire spectrum of possibilities that a pencil is capable of creating - from a gentle, seemingly breathy touch to a veritable penetration of the paper by hard strokes or dots, from soft sfumato to surfaces that appear smoothly polished.“