Carla Zierenberg

Carla Zierenberg (born August 21, 1917 in Kiel , † December 18, 2010 in Wittmund ) was a German artist and an important figure in the East Frisian art landscape.

Live and act

Carla Zierenberg was the daughter of the correspondent Carl Ernst Martin Meyer (* 1886) and his wife Meta Theda Willsen (* 1891). The father came from Nordenham , the mother from Jever . From 1924 to 1937 she attended a school in the north. In the last years of school she had art lessons from Rudolf Matthis (1888–1976), who had studied with Friedrich Kallmorgen at the Berlin Art Academy . Matthis discovered Zierenberg's talent and particularly influenced her landscape paintings.

After graduating from high school in 1937, Zierenberg worked as a laboratory assistant at Zeiss in Jena until 1938 . From 1939 to 1940 she studied medicine and married in Jena Dr. Bruno Zierenberg. The couple moved to Gevelsberg . In 1941 she had a first son there. In 1942/43 she taught drawing at the municipal high school. From 1943 to 1947 she was a member of the Westphalian Art Association . In 1943, the Zierenberg family moved back to Jena, where a daughter was born the following year.

Zierenberg now concentrated on artistic work. In addition to studying art at a university, she received lessons in drawing portraits and figures from the academic drawing teacher Erhard Schilbach. Before 1943, Zierenberg had mostly created landscape paintings. In many studies she now turned to her main field, drawing of people. Her works initially consisted of watercolors and pencil drawings. Now she used tempera, charcoal, chalk, red chalk and pastel instead. She painted her friends and acquaintances and created numerous pictures of children.

Zierenberg's husband fought during World War II and came back to Jena in 1946. The family moved back to Gevelsberg in 1948, where they gave birth to another son the following year. From 1949 to 1952 Zierenberg gave art lessons at the Progymnasium Ennepetal-Voerde, and in 1954/55 also at the local adult education center. From 1951 to 1958 she belonged to an artist group and participated in exhibitions. From 1954 to 1980 she was also a member of the Business Association of Visual Artists Bergisch Land / BBK Wuppertal.

In the post-war years, Zierenberg found his own style. She separated from atmospheric and romantic elements and found her own forms that appeared reduced and strict. Formally, her works seem to follow the form strictly and show that she closely observed reality. She preferred to paint children, focused on their gestures and facial expressions and emphasized the aspects typical of children.

From 1954 to 1956, Zierenberg also worked in oil and carefully painted several still lifes of flowers and people. From 1956 she assisted her husband in his doctor's office. In addition, she taught and participated in exhibitions of artists and their meetings. Since 1956 the artist has been helping as an assistant in her husband's medical practice and has been teaching and has worked in the artistic circles at exhibitions and meetings. During this time she portrayed people and their surroundings. In 1997 she said: "The focus of my work is the human being, his life from youth to old age".

In 1958 Zierenberg's family moved to East Frisia. Her husband set up his own large practice in Carolinensiel , in which she worked constantly. She taught at the local school and gave courses for artists and those interested in art at the adult education center. In 1970 she founded the “Harle Group” and established exhibitions at the Carolinensiel School, which took place annually. In 1980 she joined the Association of Visual Artists East Frisia, and in 1984 she joined the international Arts Guild Monaco. She was involved in the East Frisian landscape and participated from 1976 to 1993 in their family studies working group and from 1985 to 1989 in the art working group. In 1997 she moved to Wittmund, where she lived and worked until the end of her life.

Works

From 1942 to 2008 Zierenberg participated in more than 80 exhibitions in the regions in which she lived. Through her constant work in the artist groups, she influenced the development of art, especially East Frisia and was one of the most important artists in East Frisia. She mostly drew with charcoal, chalk and pencil, but also numerous colored works in the last years of her work. These were based on newly created aleatoric design methods , e.g. décalcomanie , monotype and mixed techniques.

During the last 30 years of her work, Zierenberg increasingly changed her representations of people. This made it clear that she was closely observing the character and essence of the people portrayed and using the free use of colors to depict her own ideas and visions. So she got to know the beautiful, uplifting but also demonic or burlesque aspects of people. They also changed their style in the last years of their work. In a speech she gave in 1995 in Carolinensiel , it was said that “all art is a struggle against its own transience, against the transience of things that people perceive through their senses "a fight against death" and art would not exist without this fight.

Zierenberg organized her works himself. From this, a corresponding documentation was created in 1997.

estate

Zierenberg left over 300 pictures that her family inherited. In 2003 she donated around 360 other works that cover her entire creative period to the Oldenburg City Museum . The museum showed them in 2008 as part of a solo exhibition.

literature

• Heiko Jörn: Carla Zierenberg . In: Biographical Lexicon for East Frisia .