Esteban Fekete

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Esteban Fekete (born August 11, 1924 in Cinkota (today part of the XVI. District of Budapest ), Hungary , † March 29, 2009 in Dieburg ) was a German-Argentinian painter , draftsman and wood cutter with Hungarian roots.

Life

Esteban Fekete was named Fekete István in Cinkota, now part of the XVI. District of Budapest, born on August 11, 1924. His father - a Hungarian engineer - moved with the family to Ankara and Istanbul in 1928 for professional reasons . Son István came back to Mátyásföld (today also a suburb of Budapest) in 1932 at the age of 8 to live with relatives in order to have a regular school routine up to the successful Abitur in 1942. The sporty István trained as an obstacle runner , which gave him the chance to travel to Paris with a delegation of athletes in 1947, from where he never returned. After a short stopover, he decided to emigrate to Argentina and in 1951 became an Argentine citizen with the first name Esteban, which was converted into Spanish. At the Pan American Games in Buenos Aires in 1951 , he was fourth over 3000 m obstacle.

In 1950, Esteban Fekete married the chemist Maria Alexandra Rongine, who played a key role in shaping and perfecting him as an artist (Esteban about Maria: "Without her, I would not be who I am"). The marriage remained childless.

Initially, Esteban Fekete was employed as an engineer for an Argentine construction company. His artistic beginnings lay in self-taught approaches and contacts with Argentine artists, benevolently accompanied by the art critic Julio E. Payró . In 1953 he had his first exhibition in Buenos Aires .

In 1957 Maria Rongine de Fekete received her doctorate in chemistry under Luis Federico Leloir ; she was looking for her own new place of work - found it first at the University of Heidelberg , then at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Friedrich Cramer's institute . Esteban Fekete accompanied his wife on trips between Argentina and Germany. In 1964 she went to Darmstadt again, where Ms. Rongine de Fekete was able to continue her scientific work with Hubert Ziegler at the Botanical Institute and in 1971 was given a professorship.

The couple finally settled in Germany in 1965 with the construction of a house in Roßdorf -Gundernhausen near Darmstadt. They moved in with their dog "Ulysses", who played a very important role in family life ("The dog was our son") and artist life ("portrayed" several times).

In 1978, Esteban Fekete received German citizenship.

Frequent trips to Ireland eventually led to the acquisition of a property at Kenmare in 1984 ; the couple commuted between Roßdorf and Kenmare as their places of residence in the following years. Irish motifs were at times strongly dominated in the work of Esteban Fekete.

Esteban Fekete died on March 29, 2009, impaired by his wife's illness.

Artistic achievement

Esteban Fekete cannot be determined stylistically; his works can neither be clearly assigned to Expressionism - although many works appeal to the viewer in this way - nor to representational art and certainly not to abstraction . He has developed and preserved his own style, and that in many forms: painting in different techniques ( oil , tempera , mixed techniques on different surfaces such as paper, wood, hardboard), at the beginning of the 1970s also enamel pictures, drawings , linocut and his original technique: the color woodcut , through which it established itself as unmistakable in the art scene. Esteban Fekete succeeded in mastering this technique perfectly, right up to the technically complex and artistically demanding result of the color printing. With a few exceptions, he carried out all steps himself. He developed his own cutting and processing technique for the wooden panels; for the coloring he used specially selected oil colors.

With the possibility of reproducing the color woodcut, Fekete deliberately reached a broad audience interested in art and encountered the boom in the purchase of graphic editions that began in the 1960s. When it comes to the subjects of his pictures, however, Fekete has never been guided by the taste of the public, rather dealing with dark and mystical subjects, such as B. the dance of death or illness and sadness. He also carried out numerous commissioned works for municipal institutions with subjects of the regional landscape and architecture (castles, town halls) in southern Hesse.

In 1979 Fekete received the Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Prize for Fine Art from the Darmstadt-Dieburg district.

In the last years of his life, Fekete experimented with painting on glass .

Catalog raisonné

An ordinary postage stamp - painted over by Esteban Fekete with the inclusion of the brand's motif
  • Esteban Fekete. Catalog raisonné of the prints. 4 volumes. Rottendorf and Mülheim ad Ruhr 1971–1999.

698 color woodcuts by Esteban Fekete are documented in these catalog raisonnés. A total of 781 woodblock prints had been created by 2008.

Exhibitions (selection)

  • 1957 Heidelberg, Griesebach cabinet
  • 1961 Frankfurt / M., Art Cabinet Hanna Bekker vom Rath
  • 1964 Hamm, Gustav Lübcke Museum
  • 1966 Cologne, Boisserée Gallery
  • 1970 Rottendorf, Galerie am Grasholz
  • 1975 Lichtenberg Castle: Summer gallery
  • 1984 Darmstadt, Saalbau-Galerie : retrospective for the 60th birthday
  • 1986 Sindelfingen, town hall
  • 1987 Hungarian traveling exhibition
  • 1989 Budapest, Hungarian National Gallery
  • 1994 Darmstadt, Kunsthalle: retrospective painting and graphics for his 70th birthday
  • 1999 Darmstadt, picture cabinet Markwart Müller-Linow: Retrospective for the 75th birthday
  • 2009 Darmstadt, Galerie Netuschil, “I carry the dead Ulysses”, in memoriam Esteban Fekete

literature

  • ML San Martin: Breve historia de la pintura argentina contemporana. - Buenos Aires 1993.
  • Esteban Fekete. Painting drawing. Darmstadt art edition Merck 38, 1997. (Texts by Roland Held and Ursula Paschke.)
  • Saur Allgemeines Künstler-Lexikon, Volume 38, pp. 8–9. - Munich, Leipzig: K. G. Saur 2003.
  • Creator of shining legends. Obituary by Roland Held in the Darmstädter Echo , April 4, 2009.

Foundation, endowment

In 2002, Esteban Fekete donated a large number of his works to the newly opened Fekete gallery in the Museum Roßdorf (sponsor: Kulturhistorischer Verein Roßdorf e.V.).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ (“Love”), portfolio with 10 lithographs, text by Julio E. Payró, Editorial Stilcograf, Buenos Aires, 1959
  2. ^ HH Jansen, Totentanzmotive in the work of Esteban Fekete in: Totentanz-Forschung, 9. Intern. Dance of Death Congress 1998
  3. ↑ “Half wild and half tamed”, Roland Held's review of the exhibition “in memoriam”, planned for Esteban Fekete's 85th birthday, Galerie Netuschil, Darmstadt, in: Darmstädter Echo, August 1, 2009
  4. ↑ Südhessisches Handwerksmuseum Roßdorf, Fekete-Galerie, catalog - selection from the collection (text: Roland Held), published by Kulturhistorischer Verein Roßdorf eV, 2002
personal data
SURNAME Fekete, Esteban
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fekete, István
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Argentinian painter
DATE OF BIRTH August 11, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Cinkota, Budapest , Hungary
DATE OF DEATH March 29, 2009
Place of death The castle