Born in 1939 in Celje, Slovenia, as Karl Julius Prelog, the artist moved with his family in 1944 to Upper Styria, Austria. He attended the University of Applied Arts in Graz (Decorative Painting faculty) and in 1958 adopted the name Drago in a nod to his South Slavic roots. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna for seven semesters, from 1958 to 1962, during which time he was taught by Professor Albert Paris Gütersloh, but deliberately chose to end his studies without receiving a diploma. 1959 marked the beginning of his exhibition career, over the course of which his work has been displayed in hundreds of solo and group exhibitions both in Austria and abroad. From 1969 to 1979 he taught painting, and from 1974 to 1997 lettering and typeface design, at the Academy of Fine Arts.

Drago Julius Prelog didn’t draw symbols; he created them. His work is characterized by the relationship between the narrative centre and edges of his paintings, as well as ritual elements and a pronounced pictographic visual concept. In his early works (1959), bundles formed of lines unravel themselves from the centre of the canvas towards its edges. In the typographical works that followed, the image was spread across the entire canvas, the focal points in its composition now replaced by structure and rhythm. In his “Skin and Bark Pictures”, crusts of paint jut out towards the viewer. Between these lie series of works such as the “Mountain, St Stephen’s and Profile Pictures”, which are not in any way to be viewed as conventional portraits, but as pictograms. Prelog’s years-long engagement with lettering, necessitated by his teaching, eventually led him to develop the “personal alphabet” as a pictorial subject.