Ernst Birkheimer

Ernst Birkheimer (born February 14, 1926 in Mainz ; † October 20, 1957 there ) was a German artist.

Life

Ernst Birkheimer was born in Mainz in 1926. After school he had to take part in World War II as a young soldier and was taken prisoner by the Soviets. From 1947 he studied at the Landeskunstschule Mainz . There he befriended Reinhold Petermann . One of his most important teachers was Peter Paul Etz . After a stay in Munich, he returned to Mainz and completed his studies. When he returned to Mainz, he married Lore Birkheimer and moved into a small attic apartment in Martinstrasse on Kästrich in Mainz. The attic was also his studio.

To secure his family's livelihood, he designed numerous advertising spaces in Mainz. He also designed cinema advertisements.

At the beginning of the 1950s he was one of the co-founders of the Mainz room games at the cathedral. From 1953 until his death, Birkheimer designed the stage set for the room games in the Haus am Dom. A total of 18 different sets by him were shown. These included performances of George Bernhard Shaw's Der Schlachtenlenker and Eugène Ionesco's The Bald Singer .

Birkheimer was one of the founders of the arche nova cabaret ensemble together with Hanns Dieter Hüsch and others . In 1952 he took part in the 3rd German Art Exhibition in Dresden in the Albertinum . At the first exhibition of the New Rhineland-Palatinate Group, founded in 1954, Birkheimer emerged as a highly regarded artist with two wall painting designs. In 1956 he took part in the exhibition of the Palatinate Secession for the benefit of young talented artists in the Ludwigshafen City Museum .

In 1956 he was significantly involved in the design of the interior architecture and interior decoration in the Casino Mainz cinema.

Ernst Birkmeier died of flu in October 1957 at the age of only 31.

Publications

Inge Reitz-Sbresny: Maniac chatter. Cheerful stories. Drawings by Ernst Birkheimer, self-published in 1955.

literature

• Walter Schmidt: Room games Mainz, house at the cathedral. A room theater of the post-war period, Frankfurt / M. 2010.
• “The city cannot ignore that”, In: Allgemeine Zeitung Mainz, July 11, 2015.