Gerd Baukhage

Gerd Baukhage (born July 10, 1911 in Herten ; † March 1, 1998 in Cologne ) was a German painter.

Life

Baukhage came from the Westphalian town of Herten, where he was born in 1911 as the fourth of five children of the architect Hugo Baukhage and his wife Magdalene Leonore (née Sprenger). As an architecture student , Baukhage attended the Technical University of Munich until 1932 and then the Düsseldorf Art Academy . After the National Socialists seized power in 1933, Baukhage went to Switzerland, first to Rikon in the canton of Zurich and from 1934 to Lugano . Out of consideration for his family, he returned to Germany in 1939, was drafted into military service and in 1945 was taken prisoner by the Soviets. He was only able to return in 1949. After the war, Baukhage moved to Cologne and made various trips in the Mediterranean.

In 1968 he married the doctor Maria Theresia Solbach (1922–2019). In 1989 the artist painted his “Last Picture”, in 1990 he went blind. Gerd Baukhage died on March 1, 1998 at the age of 86 in Cologne. He was buried in his wife's family grave in Cologne's Melaten cemetery .

On the occasion of his 100th birthday, Baukhage's widow donated a representative selection of 100 paintings by Gerd Baukage and 100 works from his art collection to the Cologne City Museum in 2011, including works by Joseph Beuys , George Brecht , Michael Buthe , Christo , the Spanish artist group Equipo Crónica , Jörg Immendorff , Karl Marx , Ansgar Nierhoff , CO Paeffgen , Sigmar Polke , Arnulf Rainer , Ulrike Rosenbach , Dieter Roth , Hans Salentin , Bernard Schultze and Wolf Vostell .

In 2006 a street in Cologne-Lövenich was named after Baukhage, the Gerd-Baukhage-Bogen.

Artistic work

During his brief studies at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 1933, Baukhage learned from Werner Heuser and was primarily interested in painting techniques. He only experienced Paul Klee's teaching activities at the art academy for a short time until his dismissal by the National Socialists. In Düsseldorf he made friends with Theo Champion (1887–1952), a representative of poetic landscape painting. During his years in Switzerland (1933 to 1939) he got to know the work of the German emigrants Ernst Ludwig Kirchner , Hofer and Klee. However, Baukhage earned his living with - only at first glance - idyllic landscapes from Switzerland that were untouched by modernity. He was later able to process the experiences of the war years in the Soviet Union and the Soviet prisoner-of-war in a series of watercolors created in the 1950s , which he created with unusually emotional brushstrokes.

After his return, Baukhage first described Cologne's rubble landscape and its reconstruction in the style of landscape painting of his early years. In addition, Baukhage developed his own path to modern art . Evidence for abstract echoes is z. B. a "Still Life" from 1959. Baukhage's early written and sign language images (e.g. “Typeface” from 1965) came about through the encounter with archaic cultures and forms of settlement in Italy during his travels.

Since the 1960s, thanks to the flourishing art and gallery life in Cologne, Baukhage has also grappled with the contemporary art movements coming from America such as Pop Art , Art Brut and Informel , which, however, could hardly affect his artistic design. Baukhage's world of motifs consists of objects formed by man and nature, which he composed greatly enlarged. Not only did he apply paint smoothly with a brush, he also sprayed it on with a small atomizer. So z. B. 1968 “Violet Button on Brick”, where his feeling for the restrained beauty of the material he formed and composed like a still life manifested itself.

In 1972 he deals with the most terrible results of human barriers, with violence, torture, execution and mass murder in the series with “Execution Machines”, including a “Nordhausen KZ Incinerator” (1971) owned by the Cologne City Museum. With their astonishingly unprovocative nature, these pictures accuse them in an almost documentary style language and thus also speak of the artist's socio-political commitment. Suffering from these human barriers resulted in the "barriers" as still lifes and trompe-l'oeils in the 1970s . An exhibition with this title in the Neue Galerie - Sammlung Ludwig in Aachen in 1974 gave him his final artistic breakthrough. The “barriers” are oil paintings in which he processed the appearance of floating debris, worn wooden planks and nails, which he also picked up on his walks along the Rhine in Cologne-Weiss, into large-format still lifes. He sees in the "blockage" the situation of the person that he would like to open.

Towards the end of the 1970s, Baukhage increasingly resolved the “barriers” in the image presentation with iron plates riveted onto one another. He gradually reduced his colors to almost monochrome. Here, with his extreme illusion of material, he also reaches the other end of art, the dissolution of the object in abstraction. These pictures from his last creative period have achieved a timeless dignity and validity.

Exhibitions

The last exhibition to date will take place in the Cologne City Museum from March 28 to May 17, 2009 under the name Gerd Baukhage and Friends .

• 1950: Herten, Städtischer Kulturring - "Four painter personalities"
• 1958: Recklinghausen, Städtische Kunsthalle - Vestischer Künstlerbund
• 1964: Karlsruhe, Schwarzwaldhalle - "... and they came home differently"
• 1966: Cologne, Kunsthaus Lempertz - Lempertz Contempora
• 1969: Cologne, French Institute (solo exhibition)
• 1970: Cologne, Galerie Klang (solo exhibition)
• 1972: Bonn, Rheinisches Landesmuseum - juxtaposition with the “Electric Chair” by Andy Warhol
• 1974: Aachen, Neue Galerie - Ludwig Collection "Verperrungen" (solo exhibition), + Cologne, Landschaftsverband - Landeshaus (solo exhibition)
• 1977: Leverkusen, Municipal Museum - "Gerd Baukhage - Object Pictures and Drawings" (solo exhibition)
• 1977: Kassel, documenta 6
• 1979: Cologne, Kunstverein, Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle - "Cologne artist - personally introduced"
• 1980: Cologne, Kunstverein - “My Cologne Cathedral. Contemporary artists see Cologne Cathedral "
• 1980: Cologne, Artothek - "Variations with Rectangle and Square"
• 1981: Aachen, Neue Galerie - Ludwig Collection "Black Pictures" (solo exhibition)
• 1981: Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum "Presence of Contemporaries 1 Gerd Baukhage" (solo exhibition)
• 1983: Marburg, art association in the university museum (solo exhibition)
• 1983: Berlin, Martin-Gropius-Bau - "1903 - 1983. 80 Years of the German Association of Artists"
• 1984: Seoul, National Museum - "Exhibition of German and Korean Artists"
• 1985: Cologne, Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle - "Cologne - Art"
• 1987: Bremen, Deutscher Künstlerbund, 35th annual exhibition
• 1988: Cologne, Galerie Baecker - "Memories of the War", drawings 1955 - 57 (in connection with an exhibition by Wolf Vostell) - (solo exhibition)
• 1989: Cologne, Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle - “Gerd Baukhage. Pictures "(solo exhibition)
• 1990: Recklinghausen, Städtische Kunsthalle - “Gerd Baukhage. Pictures "(solo exhibition)
• 1997: Cologne, Ute Mronz Gallery - "Pictures from 1968 to 1987" (solo exhibition)

further reading

• Wolfgang Becker: Von Baukhage, the slow painter, in: Exhibition catalog Gerd Baukhage, Cologne (French Institute) 1969
• Exhibition catalog: Gerd Baukhage. Pictures (exhibition Josef Haubrich Kunsthalle Cologne 1989 and Städtische Kunsthalle Recklinghausen 1990). Cologne 1989
• AKL (General Artist Lexicon), Vol. 7, 2003: Gerd Baukhage.
• Becker, Wolfgang: Gerd Baukhage. 30 years of painting. Cologne 2002

Web links

• Literature by and about Gerd Baukhage in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ burial place. In: findagrave.com. Retrieved September 3, 2019 . 
2. ^ Council of the City of Cologne: submission no. 2787/2011, acceptance of a donation to the Cologne City Museum , decided unchanged on October 13, 2011
3. ↑ [1]
4. ↑ http://www.report-k.de/content/view/19229/  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
5. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from October 14, 2013 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.