Otto Gerster

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Otto Helmut Gerster (born July 9, 1907 in Berlin ; † October 15, 1982 in Wassen , Switzerland ) was a German painter and art professor .

Vita

A silent draftsman from childhood, Otto Gerster practiced in Berlin in the 1920s as a commercial artist, textile and fashion draftsman for various print media. In 1928 he began studying painting and graphics at Emil Rudolf Weiß to the art school in Berlin-Charlottenburg and became in 1936 a master student at Ferdinand Spiegel .

He soon earned his living as a freelance artist, received orders for book illustrations, applied graphics, large-format painting and the “monumental design” of halls for exhibitions and trade fairs typical of the time. In 1933 he received the Albrecht Dürer Prize from the city of Nuremberg and in 1939 was appointed to the master school for the creative handicraft of the Hanseatic City of Cologne to take over the class for monumental and wall painting. Drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1942, he began teaching after the end of the war and imprisonment in 1946 at the reopened Cologne factory schools and led - until his retirement in 1972 - as a professor in a master class for free and applied painting in the art and design department of the TH Cologne . The painter Bettina Heinen-Ayech (* 1937) is one of his students . Otto Gerster became a member of the German Association of Artists in 1955, in 1957 artistic director for political public relations in Bonn and designed the CDU Bundestag election campaign, in which Konrad Adenauer obtained an absolute majority of 50.2 percent (so far for the first and only time in the history of the Federal Republic).

In 2020, during the renovation of the former Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum on Ubierring in Cologne, large-scale sgraffiti by Gerster was discovered, which was hidden behind tufa slabs on the facade . Since only a few sgraffiti by Gerster have survived - often they were painted over - this discovery is rated as "particularly significant". The wall paintings were presumably created in 1948 after the museum was converted into a venue for the Kammerspiele . They show motifs related to the Kammerspiele and were probably created with the help of von Gerster students. When the building opened as a museum in 1967, the covering panels were probably installed. Wall paintings by Gerster had already been found in Duisburg Central Station in 2009.

literature

  • Daniel Bischof, Heijo Klein, Modeste zur Nedden: Otto H. Gerster (1907–1982): Insights into a life's work . Ed .: Michael Euler-Schmidt. Cologne City Museum , 1991, ISBN 3-927396-36-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kölner Werkschulen / FH Kunst und Design (Ed.): 100 Years of Kölner Werkschulen. Catalog . Greven & Bechtold Publishing House, Cologne 1979.
  2. ^ Hans Karl Pesch and Ali Elhadj -Tahar .: Bettina. Klaus Wiens Collection. Ed .: Klaus Wiens. U-Form Verlag, Solingen 2000, ISBN 3-88234-106-8 , p. 16 .
  3. ↑ Otto H. Gerster (1907–1982): Utility graphics ( Memento from October 18, 2017 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ Jürgen Müllenberg: Rare wall art discovered on school construction site. In: stadt-koeln.de. March 10, 2020, accessed March 13, 2020 .
  5. ↑ Pınar Abut: Art in Duisburg main station. Historical mural surfaced ( memento from September 6, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Gerster, Otto
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gerster, Otto Helmut (full name); Gerster, Otto H. (alternative name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH July 9, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH October 15, 1982
Place of death Wassen (Switzerland)