As a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Pillhofer witnessed and absorbed the conflict between traditional and modern formal vocabularies in the work of his teacher, Fritz Wotruba, another artist in Storm King’s collection. Dissecting Wotruba’s constructed anatomy into its constituent parts, Pillhofer rooted his images in nature while vacillating between naturalistic and abstract forms. Pillhofer’s Man in the Quarry joins a group of stone sculptures representing Storm King’s earliest acquisitions, including works by Karl Pfann and Alfred Hrdlicka, the latter another of Wotruba’s students.