Dieter Reick
Dietrich Hermann Reick (born December 16, 1928 in Essen ; † August 16, 2012 in Deesem ) was a German painter , graphic artist , filmmaker, and object and action artist .
Life path
Dieter Reick grew up in Essen-Steele as the third of five sons of the architect Rudolf Reick and the chemical laboratory assistant Maria Leineweber, who came from a Cologne merchant family. From 1938 to 1949 he attended the Carl-Humann-Gymnasium there. During school he spent a year and a half in the Kinderlandverschickung (1941 in the Czech Republic, 1943/1944 in Galtür / Vorarlberg ). From January 1944 Reick was an air force helper , initially at several locations in the Ruhr area , later on the Dutch border and from September 1944 to April 1945 in Stettin-Pölitz . While fleeing the Russian advance back to the west, he was captured by American troops near Hagenow (Mecklenburg). After being handed over to the British Army (Stockhausen Corps Group), he was interned near Eutin until June 1945 .
From 1948 to 1951 and then from 1952 to 1956 he studied graphics and painting at the Folkwang-Werkkunstschule in Essen (today Folkwang University of the Arts ). During the break in his studies, he began training as an architect , first in his father's architectural office, then as a construction intern. In 1955 he married the graphic designer and later artist Edith Reick, née Burkard. Further professional development took place in parallel as an artist and as a graphic designer. After completing his studies, Reick worked as a commercial artist, first in Essen and then since 1961 in the Cologne area. From the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, he worked as an advertising manager in various companies, most recently in the Rhenish tile industry. He lived in Brühl (Rhineland) for the last decades of his life . He died in the Elisabeth Hospice in Deesem .
Artistic development
From youth to abstract art
The familiar environment with an in-house architecture office provided the young Dieter Reick with many suggestions for drawing and painting himself. The first larger picture is a colored oil portrait of his grandmother, which he made when he was about 16 years old. In the first post-war years, Reick occasionally earned cigarettes by painting square-meter cinema posters based on templates for a cinema owner in Essen. In 1948 he began studying painting, glass painting and graphics at the Folkwang School in Essen, which he graduated with honors in 1956. There he was in particular a student of Werner Graeff and Max Burchartz , whose concepts of art and design based on De Stijl and Bauhaus were formative. Until the 1960s, mainly non-objective pictorial constructions emerged in the form of painting and colored graphics with content-related titles such as “Composition” or “Untitled”, but which nevertheless often contain graphic structural elements in which living beings can be guessed.
Departure to new materials and art forms
When he moved from Essen to Cologne for professional reasons in 1961, the city was on the rise to become Germany's leading art metropolis. Here he discovered the Cologne avant-garde scene and made the first acquaintance with the most progressive artistic tendencies of the time ( Pop Art , Happening , Fluxus , Performance ), which had a lasting impact on his further artistic development.
Instead of wood and lino printing , the industrial-looking screen printing was used and at the same time there was a change from largely non-representational images to depict banal everyday objects (parking meters, doorbell signs, flashlights, pril bottles). In the mid-1960s, the first pictorial objects were created on the basis of industrial-looking materials (formica sheets, rolled sheets, spray paints, wire mesh). On the occasion of the annual exhibition of the Ruhrländischer Künstlerbund in the Forum Bildender Künstler, Essen, Manfred Bourée remarked in 1968: "Dieter Reick's four objects, made of wood, varnish and tin, appear cool and hygienic, a fashionable contribution to the new thing experience."
At the end of the 1960s, Dieter Reick added countless objects based on tin cans and metal rubbish bins to this “new thing experience”, with which he brought the “dirty side” of the industrially organized consumer battle into the focus of the viewer, but also aesthetically the masses of waste products of our everyday life upgraded. For example with the tin can called “Hopper” (1969), which Reick equipped with a pull-up hopping mechanism. During this time, the first assemblages , performances and happenings were also created , often also using cans, e.g. B. 1968 in the "Squirrel" campaign in which he filled a visitor's coat with tins in the Cologne exhibition hall .
From consumer criticism to political art
In parallel to the art that has been largely consumer-critical since the mid-1960s, works with a clearly political thrust emerged. With regard to the content, five groups of works can be distinguished (see below). The artistic means are essentially the same: actions , installations and environments .
Works with an anti-militarist thrust
This group of works appears against the background of the American crimes in Vietnam , which came into the public eye in the second half of the 1960s, particularly through the Russell Tribunal in 1966 and the photo report in Life Magazine at the end of 1969 on the My Lai massacre . My own war experience as a flak helper in World War II also plays a role here. The personal reference is very concrete in the mobile tins that were created at the end of the 1960s and are hung with medals from his father from the First and Second World Wars.
A series of picture-sized object boxes is dedicated to the unholy glorification of the fallen , in which Reick presents bones like relics together with ribbons or soldier identification tags. Hero veneration is also the theme of the environment “Grave of the Unknown Soldier” (1970), the exhibition of which during the Peace Week at the Hückelhoven high school (near Erkelenz ) caused some uproar in local politics in the following weeks, in particular through a letter to the editor from the district administrator Rick, in which he accused Reick of intending to denigrate soldiers' graves with his "half trash cans, altar and sheet-draped wreath".
Other antimilitarist works are "162 Starfighter" (1974) (created on the occasion of the 162nd Starfighter crash ), "Grave of the Unknown Soldier" (1970), "Bundeswehr report" (1972), "Troop Association Square" (1970) and the campaign "Sandbox Game ( Heldenstückchen) ”(1971), which he also processed into the short film of the same name.
Works related to nature and the environment
The art in this group of works deals with subjects of the worldwide threat to our livelihoods, a subject that attracted worldwide attention, particularly through the study “ The Limits to Growth ” by the Club of Rome in 1972. The overuse of our planet projected in the study to the point of hunger on all sides was vividly depicted by Reick in the object “Erressen” (1975) by means of a golf ball-sized globe, as it was also to be found on the book title of the study, which is ready to be eaten between knife and Fork, which are provided with arm-length handles. Another example from this group of works is the environment “The deserts grow” (1977), which vividly depicts the destruction of habitats through clearing . The series of objects “Street Corpses on Asphalt” (1977) can also be counted among this group of works; Animals (rabbits, hedgehogs) that Reick picked up from the street can be seen on an asphalt underground, which is housed in a picture frame like a canvas. In the course of 1976 Reick took part in the bus tour “Tree sponsor - green is life” organized by Ben Wagin , which carried out environmentally-oriented art events in several German cities. Reick's contribution was the performance “Requiem for a Tree”, in which he set trees on fire and symbolically let themselves be burned with them.
Works related to the situation of art and the artist
The subject of several works was the production and marketing conditions for art. In 1972 Reick showed the object “Art Trap” at the Göttingen Art Market : an oversized mousetrap in which he had replaced the bacon with the word “Art” and marked the taut hanger with the word “Art Market”. In the same year the installation “Art Market Lock” was created; Here Reick provided an access staircase to the Duisburg art fair with tight footbars that had to be passed in order to get to the art. Reick provided a picture of the “existential situation of most artists in Germany” with the campaign “On the Situation of Artists in Society” (1976), in which he showed himself as a tightrope walker.
Works with a general humanitarian focus
This group includes in particular the action “Human Dignity” (1975), in which Reick formed the word “Human Dignity” with bare feet over about ten meters in a heaped strip of sand, poured an (allegedly) napalm-like flammable liquid into the resulting footsteps and then poured it into Fire started. A highlight of the artistic creation of this time is the short film "Torture (in the sign of peace)" (1974), which Reick shot together with the cameraman Klaus Koch (Klaus Bako). This film ran in the program of the 6th Oberhausen Short Film Festival and was on the XVI. Bilbao Film Festival awarded a gold medal.
Works related to current social processes
An early work of art in this group of works is the "Humanae Vitae" campaign from 1968, which is based on the eponymous, in the same year by Pope Paul VI. published so-called " pill encyclical " refers. This area of work also includes the object "Abhörwand GG Art. 10", with which he commented on the Bundestag resolution of 1968 to restrict the confidentiality of letters ( Art. 10 of the Basic Law ).
The late work
After the art actions and environments of the 1970s, Reick turned back to less spectacular art forms at the end of this decade. An early example is the series of colored etchings with his own, sometimes time-critical poems. He published further poems, accompanied by pen drawings, in 1983 in the volume of poetry "Colored Gänseklein" (Edition Zufall, Cologne). The very extensive graphic work that has been created since then shows in terms of design a clear similarity to his early non-objective pictures. However, abstraction no longer appears programmatically in these pictures, as it did in the 1950s, but as a virtuoso design tool. Correspondingly, in addition to graphic series in which new form and design ideas are repeatedly tried out in a variety of ways, there are also many drawings with grotesque human and animal figures.
In addition, goldsmithing work has been done on a large scale since the early 1980s . These jewelry objects (rings, chains, bracelets, earrings, napkin rings, brooches), which are not infrequently made from base materials, often have a constructivist character, while others are more reminiscent of kinetic objects due to their variable mechanical elements . Here, too, there are repeated graphic elements, e.g. B. in the form of engravings or, using the Niellotechnik , occasionally figurative forms. Some of the jewelry objects are hardly recognizable as such, for example the bracelet from 1982, which consists of four kitchen knife blades. Many of the pieces of jewelry were initially created as cardboard models. This procedure became independent in the series of "cardboard brooches", which meanwhile comprises hundreds of objects, which Reick added, colored with watercolors, as "one-time jewelry" to his metal jewelry production as artistically equivalent.
In addition to these larger groups of the late work, many other works of art were created, such as photo overpaintings, sheet metal panoramas, self-portraits or series of small objects made of colored modeling clay, which do not fit well into groups of works.
Social Commitment
Dieter Reick was a long-time member of the Federal Association of Visual Artists (BBK). He was a member of the board of the Cologne local association for several years. In this position he was instrumental in founding the Cologne Artothek (1973). As a delegate for the federal association, he campaigned for the establishment of the collecting society for image art and the introduction of social insurance for artists . Dieter Reick was a founding member of the Brühler Kunstverein in 1972 . As a full member of the German Association of Artists , he took part in the large annual DKB exhibitions between 1974 and 1979.
Actions and Environments (selection)
- Environment 162 Starfighter (1974): The environment consists primarily of a field bordered by wooden slats on which small piles of sand are neatly lined up, each with a paper airplane. The area is dominated by a large white figure of Christ with the following slogan: “Take care that you are not misled, because many will come under my name and say: 'It is me.'” All around the field are alternately red and Black printed, numbered sheets are hung up, which, in addition to a photo of two starfighters, either indicate the equivalent of the crashed machines in kindergartens, paint boxes, ballpoint pens or birth control pills, or they testify to the death of the pilot, whose life cannot be converted into material things. Among these texts is an emblem of the Bundeswehr and the propaganda-sounding sentence: "We produce security" (slightly abbreviated text by Monika Jühlen from the Kölnische Rundschau of April 10, 1974 on the occasion of the Dieter Reick exhibition in the Artothek Cologne).
- Action Requiem for a Tree (1976): “On a Friday morning in June 1976, passers-by on Friedrichsplatz in Kassel could see a burning person lying on the ground. It was Dieter Reick who, as a precautionary measure, packed himself in refractory asbestos, brought himself dangerously close to physical destruction in order to demonstrate the connection between human existence and nature, the vegetation . Next to him was a felled birch tree and the transistor radio played the song 'In this great foreign city, in this sea of stone, hardly a petal greets you with a sweet familiar glow' (sung by Willi Schneider). "(Text by Oskar Blase )
- Environment The deserts are growing (1977): The environment shows a dozen tree stumps on a fenced-in sand field with magpies, pigeons, jays and orioles that have been decapitated by axes. A tape with the text 'A planet is being plundered' is playing. (After Christa Spatz)
- Environment interrogation booth (1978): “A locked wooden room clad in black inside, which can only be entered when stooped. Whoever enters it sees themselves exposed to glaring light and questioned in a way that is known from the interrogations of the victims of professional bans. For example: 'Do you live in a shared apartment?'; 'Do you have visitors often?'. The inquisitorial character of the so-called hearing talks, which violates human dignity, is evident in this object. ”(Text Sigurd Asper (excerpt)). - The interrogation booth was shown for the first time in the Baak'schen Kunstraum in Cologne, at the beginning of 1978 in the exhibition Recht Saat (together with Jens Hagen ).
- Action vinventne sequentes? (1982): “In a circle marked with rice , the staple food for most people on earth, three white dead pigeons hung on a pipe frame, their 'blood' dripping through their beaks onto a white cloth pad. While the actionist was now laying peeled potatoes on the blood-soaked paperwork, a sound collage documented the 272 (!) Armed conflicts that had struck people and peoples since the Second World War. From a trail set on fire by Reick - symbolically understood as the equator of our flammable globe - dark billows of smoke finally rose and their acrid smoke spread over that staged miniature inferno, whose uninvolved and apparently unaffected witness we witness every time the 'Tagesschau' is switched on. can be. ”(Text: Norbert Ulrich, (excerpt)).
Filmmaking
Sandpit game (hero pieces)
1971, 16 mm, color, 6 minutes, camera: Klaus Koch (alias Klaus Bako)
The film is the documentation of an anti-war campaign that Dieter Reick carried out in September 1971 (the day Belgium was liberated by Allied troops in 1944) at the Yellow Now Gallery in Liège . The situation of the war is symbolically represented by toy soldiers who are initially arranged in battlefield formation on a stretcher covered with sand . Hands forcefully chop an (ox) heart into small pieces of raw meat, which are then carefully wrapped with gauze. The toy soldiers are successively replaced by these wrapped lumps of meat. Regardless of the scene, monotonous birth and marriage announcements are read out in the background.
Torture (in the sign of peace)
1973, 16 mm, color, 7 minutes, camera: Klaus Koch (alias Klaus Bako)
A white pigeon is shot, hung by its legs, singed by its feet and pressed in a vice. The beak is squeezed with a pair of pliers. When weighed down, the intestines separate from the body. Blood drips. During the entire film, reports of tortured people are read out monotonously in the background, which are also displayed as text between the individual scenes.
The film ran in the program of the 6th Oberhausen Short Film Festival 1974. It received at the XVI. Bilbao Film Festival a gold medal ("Special Jury Prize") and in the same year in London the critics' award for "the most outstanding film". Partial re-performance 4./5. April 2002 within the play FSK 18: Moral by Götz Leineweber , directed by the author.
Books and folders
- Portfolio XVII of Edition Zufall: Dieter Reick - Robert Rehfeld - Herbert Wimmer , signed, edition: 40, edited by Horst Hahn, Cologne.
- Dieter Reick, Colored Gänseklein , Edition Zufall, Cologne, 1983, with an afterword by Astrid Wick-Kmoch.
- Dieter Reick, "Träume", self-published, Brühl, 1999.
Artistic book contributions
- Concepts of a New Art , edited by Michael Badura, Udo Berger and Reinhard Rock (Udo Breger Verlag, Göttingen, 1970).
- Walter Aue, PCA - Projects, Concepts & Actions , (DuMont Schauberg, Cologne, 1971).
- Omnibus 79/80 , edited by Peter Schwenk and Susanne Schwenk, (Maitenbeth, 1980).
Voices on the work of Dieter Reick
On the occasion of an exhibition in the Schwandorf art cabinet (Upper Palatinate) in December 1969, the Schwandorfer Zeitung read: “Dieter Reick's canned art makes tears laugh: After all, mobile toothbrushes, constantly warning us of the risk of tooth decay, are not commonplace; The idea of preserving frogs' legs in hopping cans must also be described as absolutely new ”.
In connection with the “Requiem for a Tree” campaign, Oskar Blase writes: “Dieter Reick's contribution was also typical of his art in that one could clearly see the simple ('folk') means of his work, which are combined in a very unpretentious way: The comedic attraction, the catastrophe, the human tragedy of burning, of death, nature, the folk song as a home-grown musician from the electronic can. Almost too literary, too ostensibly descriptive to be artistically accepted or, in other words: artistically 'lifted'. "
On the occasion of the Dieter Reick exhibition at the Kasseler Kunstverein (April 14 - May 12, 1978) the Hannover'sche Allgemeine reported on April 29, 1978 about the opening speech by Professor Karl Oskar Blase: “Blase pointed out that Reick was neither partial nor deal with reality satirically, but fundamentally ”.
In her review of the same exhibition, Renate Müller (unknown daily newspaper) writes: "In addition to descriptions of states of suffering - without too provocative claims - using the example of animals unintentionally destroyed, for example, Reick turns against militarism, axes with barbed wire, soldiers inescapably wrapped with barbed wire, Crosses of merit adorned with bones symbolize the horror of the war as does Reick's film 'Sandbox Games'. ... Reick is equally critical of the excesses of our consumer society. Cans, happenings with garbage cans have been the subject of his actions critical of consumption for years. "
Edmund Labusch also remarks about this exhibition in “New Rhineland”: “Reicks' artistic preparations are hardly suitable ... for shock therapy purposes. They are certainly not able to provoke. For that Reick has canceled their directness far too carefully or cloaked them with an attractive grip. Compared to the subtle, perky pinpricks of the Dadaists or the aggressive nagging of the Fluxus people, Reick is more than tame. "
On the occasion of the exhibition Rechts Saat in the Baak'schen Kunstraum (together with the poet Jens Hagen ), Hanno Reuther comments in the Frankfurter Rundschau of February 15, 1978 under the heading `` Full on it, also next to it - Critical comments by Dieter Reick and Jens Hagen in Baak '' schen Kunstraum Köln : "When Reick presses a toy country man into a plasticine that suggests (an) iron cross, then he ends up completely in anti-militarist trinkets."
From Rainer Wick , notes on Dieter Reick's 'social aesthetics' (around 1983): “Dieter Reick is a political artist. With his art and through his art he seeks to cross boundaries inherent in art and to influence non-artistic areas in a changing way, on consciousness, behavior, and society. His art, negation of the negative, also points to the possibility of a positive counterworld, opens up the perspective of a concrete utopia. "
literature
- Aenne Bischof, New Art from Garbage as Therapy for an 'Ideal' World - Dieter Reick is a passionate object maker , Kölnische Rundschau March 31, 1971.
- Gert Winkler, self-immolation for environmental protection , “Pardon” October 1976 p. 98 on the Green is Life campaign .
- Karin Thomas, Until Today: History of the Style of Fine Arts in the 20th Century (Dumont, Cologne, 1971).
- Otto Blase, exhibition Dieter Reick - Kasseler Kunstverein April 14, 1978 , GhK Prisma No. 17, July 1978; also printed in the 1978 annual report of the Kasseler Kunstverein.
- Jürgen Raap, A political artist - 'Art cannot surpass nature ...' - Dieter Reick , in “Schauplatz - Magazin für Köln”, 3rd vol. No. 5, May 1982.
- Rainer Wick, An Artist's Life in Time Lapse - Dieter Reick for his 80th birthday , exhibition catalog on all sorts of things from 50 years , 7. – 21. December 2008, Kunstverein Brühl
Television reports
- August 5, 1969, WDR 3, 7:30 p.m. in "Here in Germany - Nowadays", report on the "Opening of the second World Museum for Polymorphism - Happening in a disused lignite mine"
- February 16, 1971, WDR 3, 7:30 p.m. in "Here in Germany - Nowadays", feature "Dieter Reick - Objektemacher"
Individual evidence
- ↑ Herzogenrath / Gabriele Lueg (eds.), The 60s - Cologne's Path to the Art Metropolis: From Happening to Art Market . Cologne: Cologne Art Association 1986
- ^ Rainer Wick, An Artist's Life in Time Lapse - Dieter Reick on the 80th birthday . In: Dieter Reick - all sorts from 50 years : [published on the occasion of the exhibition Dieter Reick - all sorts from 50 years for his 80th birthday in 2008 in the Brühler Kunstverein, 7. – 21. December 2008] / [Text: Rainer K. Wick]. Brühl, 2008.
- ↑ Manfred Bour'ee, in the Ruhrnachrichten of December 14, 1968
- ↑ Erkelenzer Volkszeitung , November 9, 1970; WAZ-Erkelenz , November 9, 1970; News Erkelenz , November 16, 1970; Erkelenzer Nachrichten , November 20, 1970; News Erkelenz , November 25, 1970; Rheinische Post , November 25, 1970; Westdeutsche Zeitung Erkelenz , November 25, 1970; Aachen News , December 31, 1970
- ^ Letter to the editor from District Administrator Rick in Nachrichten Erkelenz from November 25, 1970.
- ↑ Klaus Fleming in the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger on February 5, 1976 under the title Der Seilanz eines Künstler : Dieter Reicks “... an excursion to the unusually fluctuating location, which has been preceded by many hard training hours, should ... the existential situation of most artists in Germany represent ".
- ↑ 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 on December 16, 2015)
- ↑ a b Oskar Blase, Dieter Reick exhibition - Kasseler Kunstverein April 14, 1978 , GhK Prisma No. 17, July 1978.
- ↑ Frankfurter Rundschau of June 25, 1977 on the occasion of the opening of the 25th annual exhibition of the German Association of Artists in Frankfurt; also by Christa Spatz in Die Zeit from July 15, 1977.
- ^ In the interrogation booth , Culture & Society 3, March 1978
- ↑ Von Krieg und Frieden - Framework program for the exhibition with an action by Dieter Reick , published in the “Kasseler Stadtausgabe” of an unidentified daily newspaper on July 5, 1982
- ↑ Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger from April 23, 1974.
- ↑ Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger from 6./7. April 2002.
- ↑ "Neues Rheinland", Volume 19, No. 3, March 1976.
- ↑ Quoted from: Rainer Wick in Dieter Reick (catalog booklet, self-published, Brühl, around 1983).
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Reick, Dieter |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Reick, Dietrich Hermann |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German painter, graphic artist, filmmaker as well as object and action artist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 16, 1928 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | eat |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 16, 2012 |
| Place of death | Deesem |