Frank Grüttner

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Frank Grüttner, photographed in Frankfurt am Main in 2018.
Frank Grüttner's signature in a dedication

Frank-Arno Grüttner (born May 30, 1940 in Berlin ; † May 1, 2019 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German freelance painter . He initially devoted himself to surrealist painting in Berlin , but changed his painting style in the early 1980s to oil paintings of "city dwellers" and also worked on religious motifs.

Life

Frank Grüttner grew up in Berlin as the son of a doctor who was consulted by prominent artists. As a schoolboy he was introduced to painting from 1952 by his drawing teacher. After graduating from high school in 1960, on the advice of his father, he first studied medicine in Erlangen , but soon switched to the Technical University of Berlin , where he enrolled in the field of architecture . At the same time he devoted himself - inspired by the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism - to surrealist painting and from 1967 saw himself as a freelance painter. In the features section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 2005 it was said about this creative period in Berlin: “In 1969 he exhibited his pictures for the first time: in the Frankfurter Galerie von Sydow, which cultivated fantastic realism. Two years later and after further exhibitions in Vienna, Cologne and Zurich, Grüttner drew an animated film for the Hessischer Rundfunk and settled in Frankfurt . "

The change of location “from the idyll of a park landscape to the grinder of a cosmopolitan city” prompted Grüttner, instead of designing surreal landscapes as he had done in Berlin up to then, to choose “city dwellers , the antihero, the person involved in social drama ” as the subject : “Frosty Frozen, aggressive situations appear to the viewer. Snapshots as if the maddening movement of the world had been stopped for a moment. "

Grüttner later experimented again with his painting technique, for example painting his pictures exclusively in shades of red, a technique that hardly allows any corrections. “That's why he prepared his Schopenhauer portrait with 40 drawings,” a commissioned work for the Schopenhauer Society from 2004. a. Pen-and-ink drawings on wrapping paper from his cycle 'Evangelium', to which an exhibition in the Museum for Contemporary Art, Culture and Caricature in Rotenburg an der Fulda was dedicated in 2010 .

Frank Grüttner last lived in the north end of Frankfurt am Main.

Exhibitions (selection)

  • Middle Rhine Museum, Koblenz (solo exhibition 1986)
  • Künstlerhaus Metternich, Koblenz (solo exhibition 1987)
  • Historical Museum, Frankfurt am Main (solo exhibition 1991/92)
  • Carmelite Monastery, Frankfurt am Main (solo exhibition 1993)
  • City Gallery Tamm, Ludwigsburg (solo exhibition 1998)
  • Kunstverein Schorndorf (solo exhibition 1999)
  • 2004 Art Festival, Melbourne (2004)
  • Kunstverein Kronach (solo exhibition 2008)

Honors

  • In 2004 a private Grüttner Museum was established in Wallenfels in Upper Franconia .
  • In 2007 Frank Grüttner was the first recipient of the Ilse Hannes Art Prize of the Ilse Hannes Society .
  • Frank Grüttner has been an honorary member of the Schopenhauer Society since 2011, and Thomas Regehly gave the laudatory speech .

literature

  • Evelyn Hils: Frank Grüttner. Cultural Office of the City of Koblenz, Koblenz 1987 (= joint catalog for the exhibition of drawings in the Middle Rhine Museum from December 12, 1986 to January 18, 1987 and of paintings in the Metternich house from January 9 to January 31, 1987)
  • Thomas Regehly: Laudation on the award of honorary membership of the Schopenhauer Society to the artist Frank Grüttner (Frankfurt aM) , in: 92nd Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch 2011, pp. 248–252. ( online [PDF])

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Welcome - Frank-Arno Grüttner. May 1, 2019, accessed May 1, 2019 .
  2. ↑ a b c Frankfurt faces: Frank Grüttner. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of May 13, 2005
  3. ↑ Quotes from: Evelyn Hils, Frank Grüttner. Cultural Office of the City of Koblenz, Koblenz 1987, p. 13
  4. ↑ Frank Grüttner: The drawn gospel. On: nh24.de from January 28, 2010
  5. ↑ With portraits and masks on the “path to self-knowledge” . On: weser-kurier.de from October 9, 2012
  6. ↑ Schopenhauer Society: Honorary Members of the Schopenhauer Society. Retrieved June 18, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Grüttner, Frank
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Grüttner, Frank-Arno
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German surrealism painter
DATE OF BIRTH May 30, 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH 1st May 2019
Place of death Frankfurt am Main