Anton van Eyk

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Anton van Eyk (born December 9, 1911 in Kaldenkirchen , † January 19, 2004 in Nettetal ) was a German artist and ceramist .

Life

Anton van Eyk was born in Kaldenkirchen in 1911 as a Dutchman . His father Anton van Eyk (1870–1936) acquired and from 1921 ran the closed Union Tonwerke in Bracht as a folding tile factory. After graduating from high school in 1931, he began studying sculpture , which took him to The Hague, Paris and Munich. From 1935 to 1938 he studied ceramics in Dresden and then worked in a ceramic company in Bischofswerda , where he met the artist Dorothea Fischer (1912–1995), whom he married in 1939. Dorothea (also Dorle ) was trained through her training in a textile design studio and drawing lessons and in 1934 co-founder of the Hentschel and Fischer workshops in Großschönau, in which craftsmen from Lusatia made boxes, furniture and brown stoneware and crockery with typical regional painting. From 1935 she worked in her own studio in Zittau as a gilder, batik, and created embroidered wall hangings and wooden chip boxes.

The first artistic works began in 1940. During the Second World War, Van Eyk was temporarily imprisoned for allegedly helping enemies of the war, but after his release he was able to flee to the former Czechoslovakia with his wife. After the end of the war, the couple ran a ceramic company in Elstra with stoneware in small series as well as embroidered wall hangings and tablecloths, but were soon suspected of espionage by the Russian occupiers and fled to Berlin in 1948, where Anton van Eyk worked in a ceramic factory for the Delfter company Blau found work in Nijmegen.

In 1950 Anton and Dorle van Eyk moved to Amsterdam, opened a studio and were initially very successful with their Terra sigillata products. Since they could not withstand the pressure of the competition for long, they moved to Leuth in 1955, near the family business, and produced small series of high quality and unusual designs. Eyk created shapes and glazes and his wife created the decors.

In 1958 van Eyk bought a 22,500 square meter plot of land on the southern edge of the former Venlo night hunting airport in Nettetal -Leuth, where he and his wife lived in a trailer from 1976. After Dorothea van Eyk's death in 1995, Anton van Eyk initially stayed in his caravan until, with the help of his neighbors, he got permanent living space in the old aircraft hangar on the Leuther site. In 2004 Anton van Eyk died. In order to preserve his legacy, a modern brick studio building with a corroding steel structure at the entrance was integrated into a decaying heat hall of the former air base as a place of artistic creation, in which workshops and exhibitions by guest artists also take place.

Works

Altes Pfarrheim St. Mariä Himmelfahrt in Bracht, middle part, sculpture by Anton van Eyk (enlargement - Hitler parody )

During his studies, van Eyk created a number of figurative sculptures that show his professional and sensitive handling of clay. In the 1950s he produced Terra sigillata , shiny red-coated vessels that bear the manufacturer's seal.

In 1997 a memorial for the victims of National Socialism was created , which as a sculpture of the "warning and remembrance" depicts the fate of the Jewish couple Hoffmann and was erected from 1998 to 2004 on the premises in Elstra where the couple lived. Although Anton van Eyk financed this work and its installation from his own resources, he had to fight against a lot of resistance, because no one, neither politicians nor politically active groups like the Verein Gegen Vergessen - Für Demokratie , to which van Eyk belonged, were willing to support the To insert the plastic. "It represents a conception of art by Van Eyk that runs through his later free work: his sculptures hold up a mirror in front of people in which the ugly, the suffering, the" unculture "can be reflected." The sculpture consists of Concrete, which is coated with colored polyurethane and is now on the property in Leuth, alongside other large-format sculptures from his creative period, wall hangings, tablecloths, ornate chip boxes and glass bead jewelry by Dorle van Eyk as well as a collection of small ceramics from the 1950s and 1960s Married couple. "They are imaginative, high-quality ceramics, vases, bowls, pots, ashtrays, etc. whose timeless charm is astonishing".

Exhibitions

The Leipzig Grassi Museum presented in 1999 on the occasion of its 125th anniversary ceramics Eyks and wall hangings his wife Dorothea from. For many years, both were regularly represented at the Grassimesse with examples of their handicrafts. The exhibition on ceramics from the 1950s in the Zons district museum showed works by Eyk in 2008. In 2014 his ceramics were exhibited in the Langerwehe pottery museum and in September 2017 in the Krefeld gallery emilith.

Some jugs and jugs are in the possession of the Museum of Saxon Folk Art in Dresden.

literature

  • ENCOUNTER with van Eyk , Sigrid Blomen-Radermacher, Viersen, 2006
  • Heimatbuch des Kreis Viersen 2002, pages 30–37; Publisher: The District Administrator of the Viersen District
  • Birgit Sroka: Brachter houses tell stories . In: rp-online . Rheinische Post Verlagsgesellschaft mbH (Germany), August 19, 2017, accessed on August 21, 2017.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Atelier van Eyk, Wilhelmina Spolders: Vitae Dorothea and Anton von Eyk . Retrieved August 25, 2017
  2. ↑ a b c d e Sigrid Blomen-Rademacher: Anton and Dorothea van Eyk , 2003. Retrieved on August 22, 2017
  3. ↑ Cube Magazine: In dialogue with art and nature . Retrieved June 15, 2018
  4. ↑ Philipp Peters: A studio and a dental practice . In: rp-online from June 25, 2014. Accessed June 15, 2018
  5. ↑ Dormago: Comprehensive overview of the German ceramics of 24 September 2008. Retrieved on August 23, 2017
  6. ^ Aachener Zeitung: Ceramic design at a high level in the Pottery Museum from March 24, 2014. Accessed on August 22, 2017
  7. ^ City magazine Krefeld KR-ONE: Exhibition opening: Anton van Eyk and Thomas Pöhler . Retrieved June 15, 2018
  8. ↑ Galerie emilith: Can you make a bird? - from the estate of the ceramist Anton van Eyk . Retrieved June 15, 2018
  9. ↑ Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden: Collection bundles . Retrieved August 22, 2017
personal data
SURNAME Eyk, Anton van
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German ceramist and artist
DATE OF BIRTH December 9, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Kaldenkirchen
DATE OF DEATH January 19, 2004
Place of death Nettetal