Hans Laabs

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The Berlin painter Hans Laabs, around 1975

Hans Laabs (born January 2, 1915 in Treptow , East Pomerania , † January 31, 2004 in Berlin ) was a German painter.

Life

Hans Laabs was born at the beginning of the First World War as the third of four children in Treptow an der Rega (East Pomerania). His ancestors were farmers, his father civil servants, his mother a housewife. During his childhood he showed an early interest in drawing and painting and took violin lessons.

But the vocation as a visual artist was stronger and so, despite initial resistance from his father, he succeeded in applying to the arts and crafts school in Stettin in 1937, where he was immediately accepted into the class of the former Bauhaus student Vincent Weber , with whom he was studied from 1937 to 1940.

After the Second World War he went to Berlin , where he took nude courses with Peter Fischer (HBK), became a master class student and took private lessons with Oskar Moll . He received a scholarship and from 1947 also commissions from the city of Berlin. In 1948 he had his first solo exhibition.

In 1949 Hans Laabs was a co-founder and contributor to the surrealist artists' cabaret " The Bathtub " in Berlin. In 1951 he became a member of the "New Berlin Group".

In the following, Hans Laabs had various exhibitions, including international ones, in which he was closely associated with the Bremer Gallery and the Brusberg Gallery (both in Berlin) for years.

From 1953 to 1983 he spent the summers on the Balearic island of Ibiza , where he lived in a penthouse with a view of the harbor and the sea.

He spent the winters in Berlin, if only to keep in touch with his numerous artist colleagues and friends, including Emil Schumacher , Jeanne Mammen , Hans Werner Richter , Hans Uhlmann , Werner Heldt , Alexander Camaro , Heinz Trökes , Bernhard Heiliger , Walter Stöhrer and many others counted.

In Ibiza he began to discover photography in addition to painting, which for him meant the expansion of the painterly spectrum by other means.

From 1984 onwards, Hans Laabs lived and worked mainly in Berlin and made regular trips to Sylt and the Baltic Sea coast, mainly to Ahrenshoop .

Hans Laabs died in Berlin at the age of 89.

plant

Hans Laabs' work consists predominantly of rather small-format works on canvas and cardboard that encompass a clearly defined range of topics: still lifes, abstract compositions of colors and shapes, heads, figures and "seascapes", all motifs that "magic" for him of the simple ".

Suggestive color strength, linear formation, concrete poetry and abstraction are the main features that can describe his work in key words. In addition, the pictures are characterized by cheerful serenity, lightness and reliable color compositions.

He himself said: "The long stays in the Mediterranean have strongly shaped my sense of color" and in this context: "I want the color to smile and sometimes sing, we have enough fears".

His exclusively black-and-white photographic works, which were mainly created in the Mediterranean region, also show similarly simple motifs in which sharp light-dark contrasts and balanced compositions dominate.

Although his work was also inspired by other artists, including a. by Paul Klee , Hans Laabs did not allow himself to be influenced by current trends in his individual artistic concept, so that his pictures as a whole can hardly be assigned to a style.

The museum director of the Berlinische Galerie, J. Merkert, called him "a cheerful melancholic" (catalog: Berlinische Galerie 2002)

Exhibitions and prizes

Between 1948 and 2002, Hans Laabs had 67 solo exhibitions throughout Europe and was involved in many international group exhibitions.

Hans Laabs received the Art Prize of the City of Berlin in 1958 and the Art Prize of the Oldenburger Kunstverein in 1959 . In 1995 the Berlinische Galerie honored the artist on his 80th birthday with a retrospective in the Martin-Gropius-Bau . In 2003 he received the visual arts critics award for his life's work.

literature

  • Hans Laabs: pictures, watercolors, collages, color drawings. Edition Cantz, Stuttgart 1985.
  • Early and late pictures. Nicolai, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-87584-294-4 .
  • Marga Döpping (Ed.): Hans Laabs: Pictures from 1950 to 1993. Berlinische Galerie, Berlin 1995. (Exhibition catalog, on the occasion of the exhibitions of the pictures in the Berlinische Galerie, Museum for Modern Art, Photography and Architecture in the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin as well as in the Galerie Bremer, Berlin as well as the works on paper in the Galerie Brusberg, Berlin).
  • Janos Frecot (Ed.): Hans Laabs: Photographien 1960 - 1972. Berlinische Galerie, Photographische Sammlung, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-930929-08-2 .
  • Jörn Merkert (ed.): Hans Laabs, a painter's journey through life. Works in the collection of the Berlinische Galerie. Berlinische Galerie, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-927873-74-8 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Laabs, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter
DATE OF BIRTH January 2, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Treptow , East Pomerania
DATE OF DEATH January 31, 2004
Place of death Berlin