EO Köpke

EO Köpke (also EO Köpke , actually Ernst Otto Köpke ; born November 19, 1914 in Diez , † August 16, 2009 in Hamburg ) was a German painter , glass painter , creator of church windows and large-scale mosaics .

Life

Ernst Otto Köpke was the son of the doctor Ernst Köpke and his wife Elisabeth, b. Schmidt. He lived in Düsseldorf from 1921 and studied from 1933 to 1936 at the Carp Art School and from 1936 to 1939 at the State Art Academy in Düsseldorf with Werner Heuser and Erhardt Klonk . He was always particularly interested in glass painting and in his second semester he was already designing choir windows for the Romanesque church of St. Lambertus in Kalkum near Düsseldorf, which were also executed. Other areas of interest were mosaic, painting and woodcut .

Köpke's artistic career was interrupted in 1939 when he was drafted into the Wehrmacht . In 1944 he became an American prisoner of war . Even during the war, he tried to keep in touch with art by taking portraits and decorating accommodation and canteens with pictures. He designed the camp church, painted portraits of the American camp commandant and his wife in earth colors, and designed a children's book.

In 1943 he married Margret Ruhfus and in 1944 his first son was born. In 1946, after his release from captivity, he lived with his wife in a village near Minden , where they had moved after the house in Düsseldorf was destroyed. Since the rural seclusion did not correspond to the nature of the artist, he returned to Düsseldorf in 1947 and the marriage was divorced. In 1950 Köpke married the actress Paula Emilie ("Milli") Geib in Düsseldorf. From this marriage come a son and a daughter. The couple ran an open house that was frequented by many Düsseldorf artists and actors. After separating from his second wife, he lived alone in Düsseldorf until he moved to Hamburg in 2006 to live near his younger son. He died there in 2009; he was buried in his hometown of Düsseldorf.

The first names Ernst Otto were never used, but always merged to EO or EO. This applied both to the oral address and to his signature and the signature of his works, EOK.

plant

In the great age of modern church construction, in the 1950s , EO Köpke designed windows with figurative and iconographic representations in many churches, but also in clinics and other public buildings. Later he mainly created architecture-related windows and window walls with a dynamic play of color and shape. “His art realizations are ... to be understood as illustrated areas of thought, the diverse reception possibilities of which, among other things, are intended to produce a therapeutic-didactic effect, especially in their intense colors. The mere fact that most of his works are in schools, churches and state hospitals seems to confirm this educational claim. ”The stained glass and mosaics do not have to be understood as museum works of art, but have a self-evident public value.

Windows created by Köpke can be found in churches in Andernach, Berlin-Schlachtensee , Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Dinslaken, Essen, Erkelenz , Euskirchen, Knapsack and Efferen , Kalkum, Kleve, Cologne, Königsdorf , Mühlheim, Neuss, Rheinbach and Velbert. In 1999, at the age of 85, he was still creating abstract windows for the Gothic church in Tennenlohe near Nuremberg. During the planning of the demolition of the Apostle Church in Düsseldorf-Gerresheim , in which a 140 m² (12 m × 12 m) window by Köpke formed the altar wall, he repeatedly came into the press in 2009 and 2010. The church has since given way to a new building, but the window has been secured in dismantled form.

Köpke's paintings from before 1950 are portraits and landscapes, but only a few have survived. Since the 1960s he has been painting large, abstract pictures, “signal images” and “with a bright center”. The following applies to the “signal images”, which are characterized by strong colors: “Without an image and a fable, spatial structure is transformed into a network of colors… Signs remain without their character. They are only the presence of spatial sections and color fields. Their lasting relevance is their 'healing function' ... There is no juxtaposition of the elements in the pictures, neither do kinetic illusions or optical illusions arise, which some well-known artists do not do without. "

The "pictures with a bright center" create a characterizing suggestion, draw the viewer to the center of the picture. “Completely geared towards the inner sensitivities of the recipient, this painting style gets by with a softened color structure that is ambiguous in its values. … EO Köpke's pictures 'with a bright center' unfold… one of the many elementary relations and ratios of a great structural aesthetic of what we dare to call beauty. "

literature

• General artist lexicon . Vol. 7. Saur, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-598-24555-8 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Alberg, 1985
2. ^ Pfaff, 1974.
3. ^ Alberg, 1985.

Web links

• Ernst Otto Köpke on the website of the Research Center for 20th Century Glass Painting e. V.