Adolf Bierbrauer

Adolf Bierbrauer, self-portrait, 1939, oil on canvas, doubled on hardboard, 28 cm × 21.5 cm.

Adolf Bierbrauer (born July 26, 1915 in Düsseldorf ; † September 2, 2012 in Ratingen ) was a visual artist, German doctor and psychotherapist.

Life

Anti-Christianity without fearfulness, acrylic on canvas, 80 cm × 120 cm, 1999

Painting by Adolf Bierbrauer, Desperate Search for the Inner Face, somnambulistic work, acrylic on canvas, 160 cm × 200 cm, 1999.

Adolf Bierbrauer grew up with two siblings in Düsseldorf-Oberkassel. In 1925 he was made aware of the philosophical work of Rudolf Steiner by his piano teacher . At eighteen he appeared publicly as a piano soloist. At the same time he made portraits of people from the neighborhood. In 1934 he traveled to the Goetheanum in Dornach in Switzerland to study Steiner's works.

In 1935 he began studying medicine at the Philipps University of Marburg , moved to Freiburg in 1937 and continued studying in Jena and at the medical academy in Düsseldorf from 1939. From 1940 to 1942 he did military service in France. In 1942, due to a lack of troop doctors, Bierbrauer was ordered back to Düsseldorf to take the medical state examination there. He completed his studies with a doctorate in 1943. In January 1945 he was sent to the Eastern Front as a troop doctor, captured in Breslau and transported to Transcaucasia (Mingitschaur) to work as a route builder and concrete worker.

During his captivity, Bierbrauer painted documentary pictures of geological investigations of the terminal moans on behalf of the camp manager. In addition, prisoners of war were used in archaeological excavations of Meder graves .

In 1949 he returned to Düsseldorf and became a trainee doctor at the Hamburg University Hospital . From 1951 to 1953 he worked as a psychotherapist at the 2nd Medical Academy in Düsseldorf and specialized in hypnosis treatments . The first hypnosis pictures were created. "Bierbrauer painted the 'hypnosis pictures' based on the descriptions of the pictures that appeared to his patients in a trance state." His public statement against electroshock treatments and insulin shocks led to his dismissal by the university in 1953/1954. In the summer semester he attended the class “monumental painting and wall painting” under the direction of Otto Gerster at the Cologne factory schools . He applied to the Düsseldorf Art Academy and was rejected.

In 1954 he received the district medical certificate for the branch as a general practitioner. Bierbrauer specialized in nervous disorders and psychosomatic illnesses. He followed the path of therapy he had taken with hypnosis.

The first somnambulistic images were created in the 1960s . A stroke in 1965 forced Bierbrauer to give up his work as a doctor. From 1973 he declared himself a freelance artist and gave painting lessons for children in his house. This later resulted in the first Waldorf kindergarten in Düsseldorf. He also worked as a pianist at Waldorf schools. In 1974 he reapplied to the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where he stayed for almost two years. At the same time he attended philosophy lectures with Rudolf Heinz at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf .

From around 1990, the "garbage art", as Bierbrauer called some of his works, was created. In 1998 Bierbrauer moved into the anthroposophically oriented Heinrich-Zschokke-Haus in Gerresheim, which he helped initiate . In 2000 his works were presented to the general public for the first time as part of the presentation of his monograph in the NRW Forum . Bazon Brock and Gabriele Lohberg, Director of the European Art Academy Trier , gave the introductory speeches.

He spent his old age first in an anthroposophical retirement home and from 2006 in Ratingen in a retirement home of the Kaiserswerther Diakonie . In the fall of 2012, Bierbrauer died of heart failure.

plant

The elephant rage attack, Adolf Bierbrauer, bronze sculpture

Bierbrauer's key works are his hypnosis pictures from the early 1950s and his somnambulistic pictures created over the last five decades , as well as sculptures made from different materials.

If portraits and nudes are found in his early work , then in the course of his activities as an artist, doctor and psychotherapist he came closer and closer to the hidden content of the human psyche . The pictures, which were taken after the end of World War II until the early 1950s, are based on Bierbrauer's search for ways to use hypnosis to heal patients from their traumas caused by war and personal past , by using the hypnosis imagined pictures of the Let patients describe them, paint them at the same time, in order to discuss them with them afterwards. Through this therapeutic method, Bierbrauer not only succeeded in helping his patients, but also in creating works of art with the help of the patient, in the sense of his understanding of the artist as the healer of the individual suffering from society. In art studies, these images are rated as pioneers of conceptual art of the 1960s. Bazon Brock compared these hypnosis images to the importance of the foot washing carried out by Joseph Beuys for conceptual art. “The results of the pictures that were created are ultimately so significant because their artistic form is at the absolutely highest level of their time. There is nothing like it for the 50s "

In the “somnambulistic works” from the late 1960s, there are many parallels to the informal art of Emil Schumacher or Emilio Vedova . References to the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock can be seen in his approach ( dripping ) and expression . Bierbrauer, trained through the hypnosis of his patients, began in this phase of his artistic work to abstract from the patient images and now went himself into a somnambulistic, i.e. H. daydream-like state to get closer to your own self as an artist . These images, which he created until the end of his life, impress through the interaction between the "incorporation" of others in the interplay with the search for one's own identity .

His sculptures, which have been created since the 1950s, show their own expressiveness, ingenuity in the language of forms and in finding a title. In his bronze figures such as the elephant fit of rage from 2001, he uses an expressive, free design that is not bound to the concrete form, which gets its informal expression through the increase in the title. They appear like trash- like sculptures, mostly made up of scraps of material that are connected with glue, metal wires and tinfoil .

Gallery selection of hypnosis images

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Art market

For the first 85 years of his life, Adolf Bierbrauer's work was created outside of the public eye, because he considered his work to be a private matter. It was not until the presentation of his work in connection with the presentation of his monograph in the NRW Forum in 2000 that a broader public learned of the existence of his works.

To this day, works by him are only in private collections and rarely find their way onto the auction market.

Exhibitions

• 1998: A. Bierbrauer , Leyer-Pritzkow exhibitions, Düsseldorf
• 2000: NRW-Forum Düsseldorf , solo exhibition
• 2001: Images of people , group exhibition with works by Armin Baumgarten , Woytek Berowski, Adolf Bierbrauer and Fabrizio Gazzarri, Leyer-Pritzkow exhibitions, Düsseldorf
• 2002: The archaic in art , Bierbrauer's work using the example of works from the Helmut Hentrich collection
• 2008: Homage to Adolf Bierbrauer, Leyer-Pritzkow exhibitions in Düsseldorf
• 2012: The big one , Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf
• 2012: In search of the lost self , Städtische Galerie Schwabach
• 2014: You can overdo it Leyer-Pritzkow exhibitions, Düsseldorf
• 2015: Natura nutrix - Homo vorax , Associazione Culturale Italo-Tedesca, Palazzo Albrizzi , Venice
• 2015: The other in me - Adolf Bierbrauers Hypnosebilder , Onomato, Düsseldorf
• 2019: BETWEEN WORLDS, with Armin Baumgarten, Leyer-Pritzkow exhibitions, Düsseldorf
• 2020: Pioneer of Social Sculpture - Part I , Adolf Bierbrauers Hypnosispaintings, Leyer-Pritzkow exhibition

literature

• Heide-Ines Willner: The end of my biography must lead into the future , Rheinische Post , April 12, 1994.
• Rudolf Heinz (Ed.): Pathognostische Studien , VII, Texts for a Philosophical-Psychoanalysis-Finale, p. 113ff., IV. How the hypnosis images are to be interpreted, Vol. 31, Die Blaue Eule Verlag, Essen 2002, ISBN 3- 89206-016-9 .
• Rudolf Heinz (Ed.): Pathognostische Studien , VIII, Importune Philosophie-Regresse auf die Psychoanalyse, p. 47, Approaches to Adolf Bierbrauer's “Hypnosebilder”, Vol. 32, Die Blaue Eule Verlag, Essen 2003, ISBN 3-89924-065 -0 .
• Klaus Sebastian : Messages from the subconscious , Rheinische Post, January 29, 2003.
• Ursula Posny: A question of dignity , Neue Rhein-Ruhr Zeitung, October 7, 2006.
• Bertram Müller: Adolf Bierbrauer - Lord of the Colors , Rheinische Post, October 13, 2008.
• Katja Knicker: The artist as a healer , Adolf Bierbrauer's hypnosis pictures, master's thesis to obtain the degree Magistra Artium of the Philosophical Faculty of the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf , January 2010.
• Sabine Schuchart: Trance states and dream worlds , Deutsches Ärzteblatt , vol. 107, issue 27, July 4th 2010.
• Robert Schmitt: The healer as an artist , Martin Leyer-Pritzkow presents Adolf Bierbrauer's work in the Bürgerhaus Galerie, Schwabacher Tageblatt, March 30, 2012.
• Martin Leyer-Pritzkow: BETWEEN WORLDS , Armin Baumgarten and Adolf Bierbrauer, m. Texts by Armin Baumgarten u. Martin Leyer-Pritzkow, German / English, Düsseldorf 2019, ISBN 978-3-982-0895-15
• Martin Leyer-Pritzkow: The Pioneer of Social Sculpture I, Adolf Bierbrauer , text in English, Düsseldorf 2020, ISBN 978-3-9820895-5-3

Web links

• Literature by and about Adolf Bierbrauer in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature on Adolf Bierbrauer in the Center Pompidou online library
• Literature about Adolf Bierbrauer in the online catalog of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen
• Bazon Brock, incorporation and representation, lecture on January 19, 2000 for the exhibition Adolf Bierbrauer, NRW Forum, Düsseldorf
• Works by Adolf Bierbrauer at Martin Leyer-Pritzkow
• The Pioneer of Social Sculpture, Online Booklet, 2020

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Adolf Bierbrauer , edited by Martin Leyer-Pritzkow with contributions by Helmut Reuter and Veronika Kolbe as well as Roswitha Mösl. Euregio Dr., Nordhorn 1999, ISBN 3-926820-70-5
2. ↑ Bazon Brock: Gesammelte Schriften 1991–2002 , Vol. III, The barbarian as a cultural hero, Aesthetics of Unterlassens, IV Strategies of Aesthetics, Visual Science, 8, incorporation and representation, p. 465 ff., DuMont Literature and Art Verlag , Cologne 2002, ISBN 3-8321-7149-5 .
3. ↑ Helga Meister: Discovered at the age of 85 , Westdeutsche Zeitung , January 29, 2000.
4. ↑ Christiane Fricke, Long-lasting “Köttelkarnickel”, Handelsblatt , Live App., May 23, 2013.