Hannes Esser

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Hannes Esser (born April 8, 1920 in Düsseldorf ; † September 17, 2007 there ) was a German painter, sculptor and ceramist .

Live and act

Hannes Esser's father, a successful master baker in Pempelfort at Am Wehrhahn No. 74, was horrified when his son wanted to devote himself to art rather than his father's craft. The father insisted on a solid education and no sooner had the baker's apprenticeship finished than Hannes Esser was drafted. Esser went through World War II to the end, mostly in Russia , was wounded five times, ending with a shot in the head.

The Düsseldorf Art Academy had barely reopened in 1946 when Hannes Esser, along with Joseph Beuys and Günter Grass , was one of the first students. Esser studied painting and graphic design with Otto Pankok and Werner Heuser . After completing his studies and spending six months in the pottery village of Vallauris on the Cote d'Azur, overwhelmed by the work of Pablo Picasso , the young painter decided on something new, namely ceramics.

In 1957, Esser settled in the Einbrunger Mühle am Schwarzbach . His sister, the sculptor Trude Esser , had received information about living in the mill. He expanded the coach house of the watermill and, together with Günther Uecker , who had also graduated from the art academy with him, his first kiln . More and more artists were drawn to the Schwarzbach by word of mouth. Together with Kurt Sandweg , Günther Uecker, Germán Becerra and Rudi Heekers, Esser founded the artist group Einbrungen / Wittlaer . Jochen Hiltmann and Bernd and Hilla Becher joined them later . Esser loved to organize and played a key role in the social life of the mill, organizing festivals and exhibitions. 20 to 30 people could sleep in the shed's hayloft. Occasionally the partying lasted for several days. The musicians Horst Geldmacher , Eckhard Kohlhöfer, Lüder Ohlwein and Klaus Doldinger made an important contribution to this .

In the 1960s, Hannes met the artist Karina Raeck (* 1938). She moved to the artists' colony and enriched his life. Hannes Esser accompanied Karina, who became his wife, on her study trips through France, Spain and Greece. Together with Karina, Hannes bought an old wooden sailing ship in the shape of a Schokker in Greece , and without knowing how to control it, they toured the Aegean Sea with a dog, cats, chickens and a goat on board. Hannes Esser traveled the world a lot and different cultures influenced his work. He dived near Hourghada in the Red Sea, hitchhiked through Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Algeria. Hannes Esser had traveled to the countries around the Mediterranean again and again. In 1968 he went to Mexico with Karina for half a year, where a friend had founded a pottery workshop with Indian artists. Hannes collected on his travels and there was a story for every souvenir. "I belong to the race of hunters and gatherers." ( Hannes Esser )

House Bolkerstraße 48, in which the Hühner Hugo was

In 1959, Esser produced ceramic works for the wall decoration of the interior of the Hühner-Hugo inn . The chicken roasting facility was located in the L-shaped, very narrow building with a half-timbered facade on Bolkerstraße 48 in the old town of Düsseldorf. In 1991, Esser's work was destroyed in a fire.

Hannes Esser initially stuck to the clay, made "art in the department store", as he called it a little self-deprecatingly, decorated entrance halls, sales rooms, old town bars with colorful ceramic reliefs, made fountains and sprawling objects reminiscent of jungle plants or coral trees. The tow relief created in 1982 hangs on Herbert-Eulenberg-Weg in Kaiserswerth . This reminds us that Kaiserswerth was a towing station (Haus Wert) with horse change. Elector Carl Theodor had set up the station in 1775. It is well known that horses (and people!) Pulled the ships on long lines upstream until motor shipping made this hard work superfluous in the middle of the 19th century.

In two years of work, Esser created a 6 by 4 meter large city model of Düsseldorf made of ceramic. It reproduces the appearance of the fortress city with its bastions and ravelins as well as its buildings, as it was at the time of its construction at the transition from the late Middle Ages to the modern era and was preserved until it was destroyed in the War of the Spanish Succession in 1702.

Since 1973 Hannes lived with his partner Sascha Schejbal, whom he had met in 1962. His Wittlaerer home was on Talweg at the old paper mill on the Schwarzbach, which he had converted from a half-collapsed shed into an apartment and studio. He had to vacate it after 35 years and in 1992 found a new refuge in a parallel street, Am Mühlenkamp 16, in part of the former paper mill, which he again laboriously converted and expanded. The only thing he did not do was build a new kiln, the kiln on Talweg was destroyed during the renovation work. Hannes Esser now devoted himself to photography, made portrait drawings of his friends and landscapes in pastel and charcoal of the lowlands around the Rhine and Schwarzbach. He made collages, such as for the special exhibition “Stop!” Against the Iraq war. To do this, he, together with Berengar Pfahl and Kurt Sandweg , used brightly colored glossy paper, scissors and paste.

In 1997, the cultural office of the state capital Düsseldorf brought the "Art Points" into being. Every time Hannes Esser opened his studio to the visitors.

In addition to painting, Esser mainly created ceramics until his death in 2007. The Hannes-Esser-Platz in Düsseldorf-Einbrungen was named in his honor in 2010. It's a narrow street that is actually only used by the people who live on it or one of the streets that lead off it.

The old paper mill as the home of the artists

“Hermann A. Raddatz was the first. In 1949, the sculptor and painter moved to the dilapidated and abandoned Einbrunger paper mill on Talweg, which later became the local artist colony. 22 artists lived and worked in the refuge; many of them became famous: Bernd and Hilla Becher, Werner Butter , Günther Uecker, German Beccera, Kurt Sandweg, Karina Raeck and Hannes Esser, to name but a few. The photographer Günter Lother lives [...] in the listed mill, which has gone down in history as the cradle of art in the north of Düsseldorf. Uecker exhibited his first nail there, the future advertiser Werner Butter lived there with his wife, and all-rounder Horst Geldmacher appeared on a weekly basis. […] "( Gök / jul : RP, The old paper mill as the home of artists, September 12, 2010)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Obituary notice Trude Esser. Rheinische Post on April 11, 2015 , accessed May 9, 2015
  2. ^ The artists' colony in the Einbrunger paper mill
  3. ↑ Horst Flötchen Geldmacher. Coolibri 2012 , Retrieved May 5, 2015
  4. ↑ Bio Karina Raeck ( Memento of the original from September 16, 2014 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.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.kuenstlerhaus19.de
  5. ^ Tow relief by Hannes Esser
  6. ^ Hannes Esser in the Kaiserswerth Museum
  7. ↑ Rheinische ART 08/2011, Art Points Retrieved April 27, 2015
  8. ^ The old paper mill as the home of artists , accessed April 5, 2015
personal data
SURNAME Esser, Hannes
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter, sculptor and ceramist
DATE OF BIRTH April 8, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Dusseldorf
DATE OF DEATH September 17, 2007
Place of death Dusseldorf