Heinz Koppel

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Heinz Koppel (born January 29, 1919 in Berlin , † December 1, 1980 in Llety Caws , Wales ) was a British painter of German origin.

Life

Koppel had Jewish parents and spent his childhood in Berlin. After the National Socialists came to power , the family emigrated to Prague in 1933 . There the son began an artistic training. Together with his father Joachim, Koppel went to Great Britain in 1938. Plagued by attacks of severe arthritis , their mother Paula could not join them. She stayed in Czechoslovakia . During the Holocaust , she was deported to Theresienstadt and finally murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp .

Joachim Koppel ran a zipper factory near Pontypridd in Welsh , while his son Heinz attended an art school in London . He learned from the German emigrant Martin Bloch , who had a great influence on his further work. In addition, Koppel began to be interested in psychoanalysis in the tradition of Sigmund Freud , which is also reflected in his art. Other influences lay in German Expressionism and Surrealism .

From 1944 Koppel lived in Dowlais, South Wales, near Merthyr Tydfil , where he taught children and adults as an art teacher. The Welsh landscape became an important subject in his paintings. His related works show mystical influences and border on the fantastic. Another subject of his work during this period was the decaying industrial districts in Wales and their residents. Koppel has also taken up the motif of the murdered mother in a series of works.

In 1956 Koppel left Wales with his wife and children. For a while he lived in London and Liverpool , where he continued to work as an art teacher. During this time Koppel began to exhibit regularly in London galleries. Eventually he settled in a farmhouse near Cwmerfyn in the Aberystwyth area near the Welsh coast. He continued to work as an artist and experimented with materials such as fiberglass and tree resin in later works .

Heinz Koppel died suddenly in 1980 at the age of 61.

Position of his work

Much of Koppel's work can be found in museums and galleries in South Wales. In contrast, he is largely unknown in his home country. From August 2009 to January 2010, an exhibition of his works took place on German soil for the first time. Under the title Heinz Koppel. An artist between Berlin and Wales , his work was shown in the premises of the "Stiftung Neue Synagoge - Centrum Judaicum" in Berlin. The catalog for the exhibition was published by Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg. On the occasion of the exhibition opening, Ingeborg Ruthe wrote in the Berliner Zeitung :

“Koppel's art is not that of an avant-gardist, it is that of a highly idiosyncratic and therefore hardly noticed late modernist. In a few years he caught up with the distinctive styles of classical modernism for himself, as it were in manic-depressive amplitudes. He used them mixed without hesitation for his enigmatic, suggestive visual worlds, in which nothing is ever pleasing or effective. "

- Ingeborg Ruthe, Berliner Zeitung , August 28, 2009

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ingeborg Ruthe: His hopeless world. An unknown painter is discovered. Heinz Koppel's pictures in the New Synagogue . In: Berliner Zeitung , August 28, 2009.
personal data
SURNAME Koppel, Heinz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British painter of German origin
DATE OF BIRTH January 29, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH 1st December 1980
Place of death Llety Caws , Wales