Hans Werner Geerdts

Hans Werner Geerdts (born January 23, 1925 in Kiel , † August 22, 2013 in Marrakech ) was a German painter and writer .

Life

Hans Werner Geerdts grew up in Kiel. After the collapse of National Socialist Germany, he first completed a teaching degree and then worked for some time as an art teacher in the school service. Sensing the inadequacy of this civil service activity, he went to Stuttgart to study the basics of modern art with Professor Willi Baumeister . After his apprenticeship with Baumeister, numerous trips and study visits took him to North Africa, the Middle East, South America and Asia. In Japan he learned the sumi-e technique, a special form of calligraphic ink painting, from a Zen master during a long study visit .

At the beginning of the 1960s, Geerdts came to Marrakech in Morocco for the first time . The happenings on the central square of this city, the Djemaa el Fna , with its jugglers, storytellers, musicians and healers, who gathered circles of people in the evening game, impressed him so much that he immediately began to create these scenes in time with the to artistically capture the rhythms resounding in this square. This was the initial spark of his artistic work, which unfolded in a multifaceted way in the following years. As early as 1963, Geerdts settled in Marrakech - near the Djemaa el Fna square - where he lived until his death.

He died on August 22, 2013 in Marrakech after a long illness and is buried in the old Koutoubia cemetery in the center of the city.

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In essential parts of the pictorial work of Hans Werner Geerdts, constitutive features of European modernism , as he had got to know from Willi Baumeister, are combined with aspects of ink painting, which is primarily at home in the Japanese cultural area. The sumi-e technique is used systematically, especially in his depictions of the crowd and circles of people , so that the line between abstraction and figuration is continuously blurred. The abolition of this boundary between abstract and figurative representation, which is so important for the constitution of modernity in general, also played an important role in the specific achievement of Geerdts' oeuvre. In addition to the depiction of human individuals, alternating between calligraphy , abstraction and figuration, and the gathering of crowds, Geerdts was also influenced by the prehistoric rock drawings of the High Atlas . In his rubbings and replicas, a bridge is built between modern art and the oldest artistic expressions of mankind.

Paintings and drawings by Hans Werner Geerdts are present in numerous international collections, not least in the Vatican Museums . Numerous exhibitions of the artist showed his works in Basel, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Milan, Paris and Rome, as well as in Japan, Morocco and the USA. An archive of his work can be found in Reinbek Castle .

In addition to the visual work, which was his main focus, Geerdts worked as a writer. His stories, prose sketches, literary miniatures and autobiographical texts relate mainly to his experiences in the Moroccan culture and living space, but are in part also inspired by the diverse study visits to South America and Asia. Geerdts' literary works have also been translated into French and Arabic.

Web links

• Artist's website