Gerhard Klampäckel

Gerhard Klampäckel (born September 15, 1919 in Vaitele , Samoa , † March 7, 1998 in Chemnitz ) was a German painter, graphic artist and sculptor; In the 1960s and 1970s, a large number of artistic works were created in public space, especially in Chemnitz (then Karl-Marx-Stadt ) - since the early 1950s, the artist, who also worked as a writer, lived and lived.

Life

Gerhard Klampäckel was born in the small town of Vaitele in the former German colony of Samoa , where his parents had emigrated before the First World War ; Brother Rudolf, who was also born in Samoa in 1916, belonged to the family.

After the end of the First World War ( Samoa became British), the family returned to their native Saxon town of Glauchau , where Gerhard Klampäckel grew up with his older brother Rudolf. The school days followed an apprenticeship as an advertising painter and also took drawing lessons. Years of wandering followed after the journeyman's examination. He worked in Leipzig and Hamburg , was a postman in Vienna's Jewish quarter and at the same time learned life drawing at the evening school of the Vienna Art Academy .

From 1940 Gerhard Klampäckel was a soldier in World War II and in 1945 he was taken prisoner by the Americans in Italy. Here he also dealt with drawing and painting. In 1947 he returned to Glauchau, where he worked as a commercial painter and portrait artist. In 1948 he took part in an exhibition for the first time (Middle Saxon Exhibition Mittweida).

From 1949 to 1953 he studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts with Lea Grundig and Max Schwimmer . After graduating, he was a cultural advisor in the Karl-Marx-Stadt district council for a short time . Since 1955 he worked there as a freelance artist. He received public contracts a. a. for murals, sculptural designs in companies, for art in public spaces, participated in graphic portfolios and wrote poems and other texts.

Klampäckel worked as a professor at the Academia Polonia Artium in Munich, founded by his Polish painter friend Leob Jonczyk and his wife Jola since the 1980s .

After the fall of the wall , he traveled several times to the Caribbean, the Canary Islands and Greece, and once to Paris. The result was an extensive and varied work by an artist who was also looking to prove himself in new forms, materials and techniques - for example, after 1990 a series of designs for fountain designs that were to find a place in the public space of the city of Chemnitz. In the mid-90s he began to implement designs for large-format pictures.

In the summer of 1997 he traveled to Samoa and visited his birthplace Vaitele. As a result of this trip the picture cycle "South Sea Pictures" was created. Gerhard Klampäckel was no longer allowed to travel to London and New York as well as to Canada to visit his long-time friend Max and his wife.

Gerhard Klampäckel was buried in the St. Andreas cemetery in Chemnitz-Gablenz ; There a tombstone by the Chemnitz sculptor Armin Forbrig commemorates him with a word from the poet Antoine de Saint-Exupéry .

plant

Literary work

Gerhard Klampäckel wrote numerous poems, which, however, have not been published in book form. Some of them were printed in catalogs and on leaflets accompanying exhibitions and can be found today on the author's website. He wrote down his thoughts “about God and the world”, his great love for life and his anger over being locked up until 1989, his fantasies of the wonderful world and his political exposure in prose.

His estate includes numerous illustrated letters written between 1980/81 and 1986 to 1998 to his third wife Maria and their son Till, with whom Gerhard Klampäckel had lived since 1986.

Artistic work

Part of Gerhard Klampäckel's artistic work is in private hands and family property. The Peter Wilhelm Patt family in Chemnitz owns an extensive collection of important works by Gerhard Klampäckel.

Selected works are represented in museums such as the Neue Sächsische Galerie Chemnitz, the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, the Sächsisches Industriemuseum , Chemnitz and the Art Fund of the Free State of Saxony.

Some of the works by Gerhard Klampäckel can still be seen in public spaces, such as the carefully restored “Windrose” in the Rosenhof in Chemnitz, or the plaster inlay in the bar in the Oelsnitz / Erzgeb town hall. Donations other than those made by the artist belong to the possession of public institutions and companies such as the Bethanien Clinic in Chemnitz, the Börner company in the Werner-Seelenbinder-Straße industrial park and the South West Saxony Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Haus Straße der Nations 25).

Exhibitions (selection)

Solo exhibitions (selection)

• 1971 Zakopane
• 1974 Karl-Marx-Stadt
• 1977 Leipzig and Berlin
• 1978 Berlin, Galerie Schweinbraden
• 1979 Meerane
• 1980 Karl-Marx-Stadt and Dresden
• 1981 Berlin, Galerie Arkade
• 1985 Karl-Marx-Stadt, gallery above
• 1987 Düsseldorf
• 1996 Chemnitz
• 1999 Chemnitz, gallery in the theater
• 2004 Chemnitz, Galerie Weise

• 2019 Chemnitz, Galerie Weise

Participation in exhibitions (selection)

• 1948: Middle Saxon exhibition in Mittweida
• since 1949: Central Saxon art exhibition in the museum on Theaterplatz
• 1958: Art exhibition of the GDR
• 1965: Intergrafik, Berlin
• 1970: In the spirit of Lenin, Berlin
• 1973: Petite Confrontation Europeenne, Galerie Edison, The Hague; Amsterdam
• 1974, 1979 and 1985: District art exhibition Karl-Marx-Stadt
• 1984: Retrospective Karl-Marx-Stadt
• 1987: Art exhibition of the GDR
• 1994: Art from Saxony, Dresden Castle
• 1999: The Dawn and Fall of Modernism, Weimar
• 2001/2002 The Own, New Saxon Gallery, Chemnitz
• 2009/2015: Participation in exhibitions in Schlettau Castle, Erzgebirge Landscape Art Collection
• 2009/2013/2017/2018: Participation in exhibitions in the Neue Sächsische Galerie, Chemnitz
• 2011: Schloßbergmuseum Chemnitz, 80 years Schloßbergmuseum. Pictures of the monastery and castle since 1750
• 2018: Galerie Weise, selection of portrait graphics

• 2018/2019: New Saxon Gallery, Generation in the Shadow

• 2019: Galerie Weise, Abstractions. Transformations

• 2019: Gallery denkART, Südsee-Bilder

literature

• Klampackel, Gerhard . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists of the XX. Century. tape 6 , supplements H-Z . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1962, p. 144 .
• Dietmar Eisold (Ed.): Lexicon artists in the GDR . New Life, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-355-01761-9 , pp. 442 .
• Catalog for the personal exhibition in the Pablo-Neruda-Klub, Karl-Marx-Stadt 1980
• Artist in Karl-Marx-Stadt , Henschelverlag Art and Society, Berlin 1981
• Catalog for the personal exhibition in the Galerie Arkade, Berlin 1981
• Lothar Lang; Painting and graphics in the GDR , Verlag Reclam jun., Leipzig 1983
• Gerhard Klampäckel: an artist from Chemnitz , text for the 2004 exhibition at Weise, Galerie und Kunsthandel, Chemnitz
• New in Chemnitz - my first years with GK , laudation for the exhibition at Weise, Galerie und Kunsthandel, September 2004 by Peter Wilhelm Patt, Chemnitz
• Various publications by various authors in newspapers and magazines (including reviews by Reinhold Lindner, cultural journalist in the daily newspaper Freie Presse ; Der Kosmopolit aus der Südsee , Matthias Zwarg to commemorate the 100th birthday of Gerhard Klampäckel in the daily newspaper Freie Presse, September 14th 2019)

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1. ^ Addi Jacobi : Gerhard Klampäckel. (No longer available online.) In: Stadtstreicher. March 2008, p. 16 , archived from the original on February 22, 2014 ; Retrieved April 1, 2009 . 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.  

Web links

• Literature by and about Gerhard Klampäckel in the catalog of the German National Library
• Homepage of Gerhard Klampäckel. September 8, 2019, accessed September 6, 2011 . 
• Gallery way. Retrieved September 6, 2011 . 
• German Artists. Retrieved September 6, 2011 . 
• Homepage of the city of Chemnitz. Retrieved September 6, 2011 . 
• Chemnitz City Library. Retrieved September 6, 2011 .