Gustl Stark

Gustl Stark (born May 31, 1917 in Mainz ; † February 18, 2009 there ) was a German painter and graphic artist. He was a representative of classical modernism and was the first painter in Mainz to devote himself to abstract art .

life and work

Gustl Stark was born in Mainz in 1917 as the son of a wood sculptor. After an apprenticeship as a decorative painter, he attended the State School for Arts and Crafts in Mainz from 1936 to 1937. After military service and wartime and severe injuries (loss of his right arm), he continued his studies at the painting and drawing school in Würzburg from 1943 to 1944 and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg from 1944 to 1948 . From 1949 he lived again as a freelance artist in Mainz. Here he was soon one of those artists who, after the experience of the Nazi dictatorship, sought a connection to the international, modern art development with a new freshness and liveliness. Many public commissions, solo and group exhibitions, works in public and private collections in Europe, the USA and Canada have made him known. From 1963 to 1970 he taught at the State University Institute for Art and Craft Education in Mainz. From 1970 to 1975 he had a teaching position at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz . He died in his native Mainz in 2009.

The beginnings of his art are related to objective intentions and the tradition of late expressionism. His striving for a geometric objectification of the expressive content becomes clear early on. From 1950 he rejected the external appearance of reality as the basis of his art. The result was monumentally designed pictures on which, in the tradition of tectonic abstraction, surfaces and expansive beams are set against one another. As a result, the graphic elements condense, the compositions concentrate on vertical and horizontal arrangements. Around 1960, Stark used metal combs to apply the paints and to spread them around. Structures, palpable in relief, overlap and create virtual image spaces of sensitive transparency. From the comb images it was only one more step to the graphic technique that Gustl Stark made famous and to which he devoted himself almost exclusively from 1962: colored embossing gravure.

With this graphic technique, the printing plate is not created by removing material, but by applying a synthetic resin compound to a hardboard. The compound is shaped into a bas-relief with various spatula tools and then colored and printed on dampened copperplate cardboard. The paper itself was included in the design process. It is pressed, deformed and structured in relief. In the process, Stark developed a stupendous imagination and formal talent that allowed him to develop an incalculable wealth of design elements with a relatively small repertoire of formal elements. His gravure prints are among the most innovative and outstanding achievements in German printmaking after 1945.

Prices

Gustl Stark's work has been awarded many prizes, including a .:

• 1959 sponsorship awards from the state of Rhineland-Palatinate
• 1962 Art Prize for Painting from the City of Mainz
• 1969 silver medal >> Grand Prix de New York <<
• 1970 silver medal >> 7ème Grand Prix de Paques <<, Nice
• 1976 Graphic Prize >> X. Gran Roconocimiento International << Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Bogota, Colombia
• 1984 State Prize of the State of Rhineland-Palatinate
• 1987 Gutenberg bust of the city of Mainz
• 1997 Gaab plate from the city of Mainz
• 2003 Gutenberg plaque from the city of Mainz

Literature (selection)

• Hanns Vollmer: General Lexicon of Fine Artists of the 20th Century , Leipzig 1958.
• Hans H. Hofstätter: The painterly work of Gustl Stark (Small Writings of the Society for Fine Arts Mainz) , Mainz 1962.
• Wolfgang Venzmer: On Gustl Stark's gravure printing (Mittelrheinisches Landesmuseum catalog), Mainz 1982.
• Dieter Wallentin: On the adventure of printing - comments on the gravure prints by Gustl Stark , (in: Catalog of works of gravure prints 1966–1990), Mainz 2003.

Web links

• Literature by and about Gustl Stark in the catalog of the German National Library