Adelheid imperial seal

Adelheid Reichsiegel , née Adelheid Hämmer (born May 10, 1931 in Stadl near Landsberg am Lech ; † March 9, 2018 in Eschenlohe ) was a German painter whose work can be attributed to naive art.

Career

Adelheid Hämmer , the painter's maiden name, was born as the daughter of an unmarried “maid”. Since the mother could not look after her child, Adelheid grew up with her grandparents in Schongau. The grandmother is described as hard and narrow-minded. The girl received affection in the rural environment of the neighborhood. She herself describes her school days with the Carmelites as "happy". She was not allowed to take advanced classes there. After attending school, she worked as an agricultural assistant ("maid") on various farms in the Allgäu. In 1953 she married the farmer Josef Reichsiegel ("Baltes") in Echelsbach / Bad Bayersoien, today Ldkrs. Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

At the age of 35, the farmer Adelheid Reichsiegel began to paint as an autodidact. The causal reason for this was the construction of a resettler's yard (so-called "Balteshof", 1964/65), for whose decoration there was no longer any money. Therefore Reichsiegel began to decorate old furniture and room walls with their own paintings. Her own handwriting and personal style are already recognizable. After her first attempts “in oil” she used common emulsion paints, with which she gave her paintings and reverse glass paintings an extraordinary light atmosphere and luminosity. Holiday guests on the farm became the first buyers and collectors. One of her vacationers arranged a trip to Sweden with a solo exhibition in the small town of Högernas. At an exhibition at the Agriculture Festival in Munich, she received first prize in 1978.

The accidental death of her only son and heir to the court (1979) brought her first creative crisis, which she overcame with the help and support of her husband.

She became known beyond her home area through the biography “Bittgang” by Helmut Zedelmaier and Giudo Marc Pruys (1995). German magazines ("Bunte", "Frau im Spiegel", "Das Magazin") and daily newspapers published reports on "the painting farmer from Pfaffenwinkel" or "... vom Balteshof". In 1996, the Bavarian representation in Berlin invited them to an exhibition with a book presentation. In 1998 the Bavarian television broadcast a film about her ("Weißblaue Notizen").

With the death of her husband (2000), she again fell into a depressive crisis, her painting and exhibition activities were reduced. In 2003 one of her daughters took her own life. This broke both the painter's life and creativity. She never picked up a brush or paint again. She spent her life in a nursing home until the end of March 2018.

A collection of her pictures is now in the " Museum im Bierlinghaus " in Bad Bayersoien .

literature

• Helmut Zedelmaier / Hugo Marc Pruys: Bittgang - life and work of the painting farmer Adelheid Reichsiegel. edition q, Berlin 1995
• Peter Jacobs: Elephants on the Alm - About Adelheid Reichsiegel. In: The magazine. No. 8/1995, p. 34
• Michael Westermann: A peasant woman is conquering the art world. In: Woman in the mirror. 1995
• Daniela Debus / Jan van Frenckell: The Picasso peasant woman. In: Bunte. 1995