Emil Cimiotti

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Emil Cimiotti portrayed by Oliver Mark ,issenbrück 2009
African, later greetings to Willi Baumeister (2002). In front of the Marl town hall
Leaves fountain in Hanover, July 2010
Large finial in Berlin-Westend

Emil Cimiotti (* 19th August 1927 in Göttingen ; † 13. October 2019 ) was a German sculptor who primarily by its after lost wax created sculptures Bronze is known and the time of the German Informel of this style has been attributed to the wider community.

Life

Cimiotti grew up in Göttingen, according to his own account he came from “very simple circumstances”. His father was a worker, he himself “only attended elementary school”, but was “a very passable student”. Already there it was noticed that he could "draw and paint better than his classmates". It was actually always clear to him that he would “one day do something in this direction professionally”. That was "of course completely unimaginable for his parents".

As an adolescent, he was drafted as an anti-aircraft helper , then in the last months of the war as a soldier on the Eastern Front , but in the end he was taken prisoner by the British . After his release, he initially completed an apprenticeship as a stonemason in Göttingen from 1946 to 1949 , which, however, disappointed him from an artistic point of view. At the same time he tried his hand at sculpture and drawing on an autodidactic basis . He had the decisive experience when he took drawing lessons from Hans Pistorius at the pedagogical university in Göttingen : He was “able to bring art closer, more emphatically than one was used to from drawing lessons: it was he who gave me pointed the way to seeing and knowing what art in Nazi Germany had passed us by for decades ”.

From 1949 to 1951 Cimiotti studied at the Stuttgart Art Academy with Otto Baum and Karl Hils . They refused to give Cimiotti corrections because he was too inappropriate for them. Willi Baumeister, however, who taught painting at the academy, challenged and encouraged him through his interest. The economic situation of young students improved: While he had initially earn without financial support from the parents' home a living by doing odd jobs, he received one of the first grants , which the studienstiftung awarded in the field of art. Almost all early sculptural and graphic works were later destroyed.

In 1951 Cimiotti went to Karl Hartung at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin . Cimiotti remembers that he was reluctant to follow his instructions, that he was no longer interested in nude studies at the time, and that this only resulted in “moderate results”. Instead, Cimiotti continued his formal studies that he had started in Stuttgart. On the grounds of lack of talent and arrogance, he was then expelled from class after two months. Cimiotti went to Paris to see Ossip Zadkine for a semester . He visited Constantin Brâncuși , Le Corbusier and Fernand Léger . In 1952 Cimiotti returned to the Stuttgart Art Academy, where he finished his academic studies in 1954. In the same year he married Brigitte Hörz. The first bronzes with small-format structures were produced from 1955 onwards. Cimiotti had already created them according to the principle of the lost wax process, a process with a lost shape that, unlike the more widespread sand casting process, does not allow overlay casts, but allows specific design of internal structures and was mainly used by Cimiotti from now on into old age. Much of his early works were cast using this method in the bronze workshop of the Stuttgart Academy by master foundry Herbert Heinzel. Suggestions for the idiosyncratic sculptures can be found in the work of his friend Willi Baumeister as well as in Ossip Zadkine, Jean Fautrier and Alberto Giacometti.

In 1956 there were first exhibitions and severe pitting by art critics. In 1957 Cimiotti received the “ young west 57” art award for sculpture in the bronze category. The same works that had just been panned out have now been enthusiastically celebrated after Albert Schulze-Vellinghausen and John Anthony Thwaites had reported very positively about it. 1958 Cimiotti was with a group of works in the Italian Pavilion of the 29th Biennale in Venice represented. In 1959 he received the “young west 59” art award for hand drawing as well as the Villa Massimo scholarship in Rome . He took part in documenta II in Kassel in 1959 and in exhibitions in the USA and Paris . In 1960, some of his works from Rome were exhibited at the Cologne Art Association and almost all of them were acquired by museums. He took part in the 30th Venice Biennale in the German Pavilion with Baumeister , Bissier and Schmidt-Rottluff .

In 1963 he was appointed a founding member of the Braunschweig University of Fine Arts , and in 1964 he took part in documenta III . In 1966 he changed his way of working, he managed overlay casts in sand casting . Larger free sculptures were created for the Universities of Göttingen , Kiel and Konstanz . In 1968 he took part in documenta IV . In 1971 Cimiotti returned to his old technique of working directly in wax. It emerged still life , ultimately vanitas motifs . Cimiotti first used color in his sculptures.

In 1981/1982 his “Stauffenberg Project” consisting of three sculptures was completed in memory of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg , but was rejected by the client. Incidentally, a serious accident in the family in 1981 barely allowed sculptural work until mid-1983; instead, Cimiotti works as a draftsman.

In 1984 Emil Cimiotti received the Lower Saxony Culture Prize.

In 1989 the last years of teaching at the University of Fine Arts in Braunschweig and the move to the new studio in Hedwigsburg followed . Extremely productive years followed, with retrospectives in Osnabrück and Recklinghausen . He took part in the exhibition " European Sculpture of Informel " in the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg . However, he distanced himself from direct involvement in the Informel early on.

Emil Cimiotti was on the executive board of the German Association of Artists in 1970 . As a full member of the DKB, he participated in over 30 major annual exhibitions between 1957 and 1993.

In 1994 he was elected a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts , Fine Arts section. He is also an honorary member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts .

Emil Cimiotti was included with his work in the " artist database and estate archive Lower Saxony ".

plant

Sculptural work

Emil Cimiotti's works express form problems. The breaking open of the surfaces of the hollow forms is characteristic of this work. In doing so, he decidedly turns away from the model of the closed, tense forms of his short-term but formative teacher Karl Hartung, but also from the sculptural traditions of bronze casting , which extend into classical modernism. At the same time he takes up his most important topic, the relationship between inner and outer space. The bronze now has cracks, holes and glimpses. The bronze grants an idiosyncratic sensitivity for inside and outside, for body and space as well as a sensitive material character and no longer acts as a limitation of the form, so that, for example, the unusual motif in the sculpture that has appeared since the stay in Rome is only possible. But Cimiotti's motifs never have the character of representation. The titles are often in tension with the shape of the work, the meaning of which is thus expanded. Also human heads or entire figures, which are sometimes identified by the titles as veritable portraits, but whose shape rather points to death and transience and is therefore close to the other works on this topic, in which bones , skulls or leftovers appear. In the mid-1960s, individual motifs, such as flowers, were worked out into strong, plump individual forms and, since 1967, partly also cast in large formats using the sand casting process and in editions. But Cimiotti dropped this technique again in 1971 and since then has only turned to lost wax casting. After these individual figures, imprints of objects, especially large plant leaves, have also been integrated into the sculpture since the mid-1970s. In old age, Cimiotti switched to creating paper reliefs, which were exhibited at the Kunstverein Iserlohn in 2016, for example.

Drawing work

The drawings often take up the themes of the sculptural works with a time shift and lead them to other solutions that correspond to the medium . In doing so, one medium gives the other suggestions, such as, for example, the colourfulness of the ballpoint pen drawings from 1973 onwards by reworking them with opaque white and first transferred to the sculptural works in 1979 with the painting of the little table deck dich-leergegessen that was created two years earlier . Since then, the sculptural works have usually been painted in white, black and earth colors, which remains autonomous in relation to the form and thus gives them a further dimension that extends beyond the object.

Exhibitions (selection)

  • 2015: A pioneer of post-war sculpture with new works, sculptures and paper reliefs , Kunstraum Bernusstrasse, Frankfurt a. M.
  • 2017: Emil Cimiotti. Zum 90 , Sprengel Museum , Hanover
  • 2017/18: Emil Cimiotti. Because what is inside is outside - retrospective , Georg Kolbe Museum , Berlin
  • 2018: retrospective . Edwin Scharff Museum, Neu-Ulm

honors and awards

  • 1953 winner of the “Art Prize of the Young” of the state of Baden-Württemberg
  • 1955 winner of the “Art Prize of the Young” of the state of Baden-Württemberg
  • 1956 winner of the “Art Prize of the Young” of the state of Baden-Württemberg
  • 1957 Young West Art Prize for Sculpture
  • 1959 Young West Art Prize for hand drawing
  • 1959 Award of the board of the Friends of Young Art Baden-Baden
  • 1959 scholarship from Villa Massimo in Rome
  • 1984 Lower Saxony Prize for Culture
  • 1992 Lower Saxony Order of Merit, 1st class
  • 1994 elected member of the Academy of the Arts in Berlin
  • 1994 laureate of the art prize of the SPD parliamentary group in the Lower Saxony state parliament
  • 2006 Ernst Rietschel Art Prize
  • 2018 election as honorary member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, Munich

literature

  • 2019. Emil Cimiotti: "Paper Reliefs II", Ed .: Prof. Dr. Christa Lichtenstern, 128 pages. ISBN 978-3-00-063045-3 .
  • 2017. Emil Cimiotti: "Paper reliefs and bronzes", Ed .: Galerie Michael Haas and Prof. Dr. Christa Lichtenstern, 54 pages.
  • 2017. Emil Cimiotti: "Because what is inside. That is outside", Ed .: Prof. Dr. Christa Lichtenstern, 176 pages. ISBN 978-3-86228-167-1 .
  • 2017. Emil Cimiotti: "To the 90th paper reliefs and sculptures", Ed .: Christa Lichtenstern and Reinhard Spieler, 64 pages. ISBN 978-3-89169-238-7 .
  • 2016. Emil Cimiotti, paper reliefs , edited by Christa Lichtenstern and Joachim Stracke , author Christa Lichtenstern. Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg. ISBN 978-3-86828-682-3 . 112 pages.
  • 2013. Bergenthal, Stracke: Cimiotti. Structures. Kerber Verlag Bielefeld. 2013. 248 pages. ISBN 978-3-86678-821-3 .
  • 2013. Birgit Jooss : Postcard from Rolf Szymanski to Emil Cimiotti. In: Anzeiger des Germanisches Nationalmuseum. Edited by G. Ulrich Großmann, Nuremberg pp. 311–312.
  • 2012. Emil Cimiotti. Occupy the space completely differently. Exhib. Cat. Gerhard Marcks Foundation, Bremen. ISBN 978-3-924412-75-3
  • 2005. Bergenthal, Stracke: Emil Cimiotti. Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg. 300 pages. ISBN 3-936636-54-0 .
  • 1999. Cimiotti, Emil in: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists of the XX. Century. Sixth volume (VZ, supplements AG) , EA Seemann, Leipzig 1999 (study edition). ISBN 3-363-00730-2 (p. 382)
  • 1995. Marc Fredric Gundel: Academy students and teaching after 1945. On the significance and problems using the example of Otto Baum and Herbert Baumann as art college teachers. Dissertation University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, p. 61.
  • 1956. Württembergischer Kunstverein (ed.): Painter and sculptor. Exhibition of the Württ. Kunstverein Stuttgart in the art building on Schloßplatz 29 March – 29. April 1956 , Stuttgart, 2 pages without page number.

Web links

Commons : Emil Cimiotti  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Secondary links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Emil Cimiotti obituary notice , FAZ October 16, 2019
  2. a b c An artist's life with bronze - Interview with Emil Cimiotti , Interview with Ulrich Schmalstieg, December 18, 2007, pdf (489 kB), accessed on January 13, 2019
  3. ^ Hans Pistorius, Lucy von Weiher, Städtisches Museum Göttingen: Hans Pistorius: Exhibition at the Städtisches Museum Göttingen from September 16 to November 11, 1962 , Verlag Städtisches Museum Göttingen, 1962
  4. ^ Kunsthalle Recklinghausen: The winners of the »young west« art prize , accessed January 7, 2017
  5. Hans-Adelbert Karweik: Zerbrechlich, but upright - retrospective for Emil Cimiotti in the Städtische Galerie im Schloss Wolfsburg , Braunschweiger Zeitung, November 6, 2005, accessed January 7, 2018
  6. Christoph Brockhaus and Gottlieb Leinz (eds.): European sculpture of the Informel 1945–1965 . With a contribution by Cimiotti: Notes on informal sculpture . Haniel, 1995, ISBN 978-3-89279-059-4
  7. Thomas Emden-Weinert: Plastic of the Informel
  8. ^ Emil Cimiotti: biography on his website
  9. kuenstlerbund.de: Board members of the German Association of Artists since 1951 ( Memento of the original from December 17, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed April 7, 2016)  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.kuenstlerbund.de
  10. kuenstlerbund.de: Exhibitions since 1951 ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed April 7, 2016)  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.kuenstlerbund.de
  11. ^ Academy of the Arts in Berlin: Entry on Emil Cimiotti
  12. Honorary Members. (No longer available online.) In: www.badsk.de. Archived from the original on December 9, 2018 ; accessed on December 7, 2018 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.badsk.de
  13. Kunstverein Iserlohn: Emil Cimiotti: Papierreliefs , Villa Wessel, April 23, 2016 - July 3, 2016
  14. ^ Art: art edition March-April ISSN  1866-542X p. 22