Tag: germany

Greger Gaida

Two Sculpture Installations by Gregor Gaida” ‘Attaboys’ and ‘Kind und Kreide 2′

Artist Gregor Gaida lives and works in Bremen, Germany. His figurative sculptures often depict aggressive, even violent people engaging with each  other under unknown circumstances, as with this pair of mischievous aluminum boys titled “Attaboys” installed in 2012. Gaida says that he often bases his figures off of images found in magazines and books.

“The found footage is often no more than an impulse that is no longer discernible in the further development of the shape. Analogous to photography, my objects are three-dimensional snapshots. The characters are frozen in movement and often cropped along imaginary image borders. I transport the fragmented character of photos into the third dimension. Simultaneously, when dealing with color and options of shaping, painterly characteristics appear. Thus, the life-sized special interventions are formally attributed to sculpture but are equally part of painterly and photographic categories.”-Gregor Gaida

“Attaboys” appears to be a reinterpretation of another set of sculptures from 2008, “Kind und Kreide 2”, where two similar boys are seen drawing a line with chalk.

Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer, “Sprache der Vögel”, 1989,  Lead, Steel, Wood, Oil, Plaster, Resin and Acrylic

Anselm Kiefer is a German painter and sculptor. He studied with Joseph Beuys and Peter Dreher during the 1970s. His works incorporate materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac.

The poems of Paul Celan have played a role in developing Kiefer’s themes of German history and the horror of the Holocaust, as have the spiritual concepts of Kabbalah. In his entire body of work, Kiefer argues with the past and addresses taboo and controversial issues from recent history. Themes from Nazi rule are particularly reflected in his work; for instance, the painting “Margarethe” (oil and straw on canvas) was inspired by Paul Celan’s well-known poem “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”).

His works are characterised by an unflinching willingness to confront his culture’s dark past, and unrealised potential, in works that are often done on a large, confrontational scale well suited to the subjects.  It is also characteristic of his work to find signatures and/or names of people of historical importance, legendary figures or historical places. All of these are encoded sigils through which Kiefer seeks to process the past.

This has resulted in his work being linked with the movements New Symbolism and Neo–Expressionism. Kiefer has lived and worked in France since 1992. Since 2008, he has lived and worked primarily in Paris and in Alcácer do Sal, Portugal.

Wolfgang Stiller

Wolfgang Stiller, “Matchstickmen”, Wood Installation

German artist Wolfgang Stiller created the “Matchstickmen’” using head molds that he had laying around his studio. The giant matchsticks created of thick pieces of lumber are standing or lying in the room. The faces are all different and meant to look as if they simply emerged in the wood after burning each flammable tip.

Markus Reugels

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Photography of Markus Reugels; Paint Splash Series

German artist Markus Reugels specializes in high-speed and macro photography. By isolating the basslines from techno tracks, Markus captured these incredible and brief moments of explosive colour.

He placed a transparent scrim over the diaphragm of a speaker. Then he chooses a song and cranks up the volume, making the splashes of colour jump to the beat of music, all the while capturing it on camera. His playlist varied from Miles Davis to Karlheinz Stockhausen to Kraftwerk.

Klimas spent around 6 months and 1,000 shots to finish the series in his studio in Dusseldorf, Germany. He says he owes his body of work to the influence of Hans Jenny, the father of Cymatics, the study of sound waves and vibration.

Matthieu Bourel

Matthieu Bourel, “Education / Formatting”, 2016, Animated Version

Matthieu Bourel is a German collage and digital artist whose work veers uneasily from nostalgia to technological dystopia. Bourel combines traditional cut and paste collage techniques with digital editing, digital animation, and even sound design to create a body of work that blurs the distinction between illustration, graphic design and art installation.

Bourel describes his work as “data-ism” and the reference to the original Dada movement of the early twentieth century is more than a play on words. Like his Dadaist precursors, Bourel delights in creating shocking juxtapositions, ironic distance and high-brow/low-brow mash-ups.

Roland Rafael Repczuk

Roland Rafael Repczuk, Title Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 1999

Roland Rafael Repczuk is a surrealistic painter from Hanerau-Hademarschen, Germany. He mixes his own oil paints out of light-fast pigments. He also does mosaic panels of Venetian glass pieces.

Roland Rafael Repczuk was born in 1963 in Kassel, a city located on the Fulda River in northern Hesse, Germany. He relocated, with his family, to Euskirchen, a seven-hundred year old city close to Cologne, Germany. Influenced by the artwork of german painter and sculptor Joseph Beuys and American craftsman Gustav Bereur, Repczuk decided to pursue an art career. 

Roland Repczuk exhibited his first works at an action art exhibition held in July of 1980 in Carqueiranne, located in southeastern France. This was followed by several exhibitions in the city of Euskirchen in 1981. After extensive traveling through Europe, Repczuk moved to the south of France and changed his style in 1985 from contemporary modern to a more tradition craft. Since then, he has had many exhibitions of his work in Germany and throughout Europe.

Using the techniques of the old master painters, Roland Repczuk creates realistic oil paintings of a surrealistic nature. At the end of 1990, he moved back to Germany with his family, settling in Hamburg and continued producing his paintings, mosaics and frescoes.

Ernest Haeckel

Lithographs by Ernst Haeckel

“Kunstformen der Natur”, or “Art Forms in Nature”, encapsulates biologist Ernst Haeckel’s response to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Haeckel  published these exquisitely rendered depictions of flora and fauna in ten installments of ten illustrations from 1899 to 1904, aiming to widen the general public’s understanding of naturalism.

Haeckel also clearly saw his illustrations as more than just scientific documentation. In introducing one of his plates, he wrote that its patterns would not be out of place in embroideries or on urns and bottles. Haeckel’s elaborate forms have been called a precursor to art nouveau, and his influence even stretched to architecture.

Frank Buchwald

Frank Buchwald, Machine Light Number Three

Frank Buchwald is a interior designer and manufacturer of furniture, lights, and objects. He studied design at the University of the Arts in Berlin. He is also a painter and freelance illustrator.

Machine light number 03 is made of burnished steel and burnished brass with a  tube 60 watt lamp bulb. It is 24 inches long and 11 inches high.

Otto Hettner

Otto Hettner, “Rowers”, Pre 1931, Oil on Canvas

Born in Dresden in January of 1875, Hermann Otto Hettner was a German illustrator, painter, engraver, and sculptor. Between 1897 and 1904, he studied at Karlsruhe’s Academy of Fine Arts, under painter and sculptor Robert Pötzelberger, and later at the Académie Julian in Paris. 

In 1904, Otto Hettner relocated to Florence, Italy, where, in October of 1905, Jeanne Alexandrine Thibert gave birth to his son Roland. He later married Jeanne Thibert in London in May of 1907; a daughter, Sabine Hettner, who would become a noted landscape and portrait painter, was born the following year. With his family, Hettner returned to Dresden in 1913 and studied at its Academy of Fine Arts. In 1916, he became an executive committee member of the Free Secession, an association of modern artists in Berlin, and,  in  1917, became Director of the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where he taught as a Full Professor until 1927. 

Hettner illustrated various books for publishers, including art dealer Paul Cassirer’s Pan-Presse imprint, Avalun-Verlag in Dresden, and Marses-Gesellschaft, an imprint collaboration between art historian Julius Meier-Graefe and avant-garde publisher Reinhard Piper. Among these works were lithographic illustrations done for Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s 1923 “Florindo”, a  1923 publication of the ancient Greek novel by Longus entitled “Daphnis and Chloe”, Spanish writer Miguel de Cervnates’s “La Galatea”, and author-journalist Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Earthquake of Chile”. 

Hermann Otto Hettner passed away in Dresden in April of 1931. His works are in private collections and can be seen in the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco.

Insert Image: Otto Hettner, “Bogenschütze”, 1901, Oil on Canvas,  100 x 80 cm, Kulturhistorische Museum, Magdeburg