Josef Hirthammer
Josef Hirthammer (* 1951 in Bad Reichenhall ) is a German painter , sculptor and photographer .
The first artistic steps
Josef Hirthammer was born in Bad Reichenhall in 1951. His family had set up a small food factory in the post-war years. In a purely economically oriented family home, he had no contact with art. At the age of 16 he met the painter Hermann Ober - her father - through a classmate . He was immediately fascinated by this personality and his art. During several stays in his studio at the Salzburger Kunstverein , Josef Hirthammer made his first prints using the linocut technique . He soon wandered through all of the artist's studios and thus got to know the most varied of artistic styles of the time. After graduating from high school and then doing military service, he moved to Munich while young and married to study art there.
The academic years
During his studies he got to know and love the works of the painters Ernst Fuchs , Karl Korab and Friedrich Meckseper and created numerous small paintings and gravure prints in their technique and representation. The pictures of Horst Janssen exerted a further fascination on the student Hirthammer. He himself developed a representation of his pictures combined from the facets of these models. He often used the sequence as his favorite compositional characteristic. First exhibitions in small galleries in Munich enabled him to easily finance his studies.
The artist group characters
At the end of the 1970s, Hirthammer created numerous objects with found materials. At that time he described himself as a " tracker ". Together with Karol Hurec, Klaus Neuper and Jürgen Schehak he founded the group in 1980. In 1978 Josef Hirthammer began to deal intensively with the commodity teabag. As a result, various objects and sculptures were created with this throw-away object.
Delicate drawings of objects formed with many tea bags lined up in a row up to oversized tea bags made of copper were exhibited in the legendary Studio F gallery in Stuttgart. Installations and object boxes with a wide variety of found objects were created in these few years. In this period of time, the roots of his subsequent decades-long occupation in and with nature can be found.
Basel and its contemporaries
In 1982 Josef Hirthammer made a radical turning point in his art. From then on he dealt with his contemporaries. Large-format paintings and wax pencil drawings were always created with the human motif. With portraits of "cool" women and men, as they could be found in typical trendy scenes in every big city, he dared to document the zeitgeist of these years with just a few brushstrokes. In the following years his name became a synonym for time-critical, figurative and striking painting by his fellow men. There is no doubt that for the artist it was both a reappraisal and parody of an increasingly rampant society and way of life.
His paintings and drawings were presented as a one-man show at Art Basel for several years in a row , making him a sought-after young artist of his time. During these years he met the Swiss gallery owner, curator and collector Jean Kämpf. A long-term, intensive friendship and close economic cooperation developed from this.
Natural Pan-Sensualism
In the same year Josef Hirthammer devoted himself ideologically to art with and in nature. First works of his now following artistic creation - the natural art - emerged. However, he did not go public with it until the early 1990s. In 1987 he developed his major project, natural chess , an artistic formulation of global human intervention in nature through architecture.
Also in the same year he realized his skinning nature project . He took 30 cm × 30 cm pieces of meadow from the ground and poured them in acrylic. He skinned the earth and sealed the open wounds with dated and signed aluminum plates.
Josef Hirthammer presented his new art - natural pan-sensualism - to the public for the first time in an extensive exhibition in Solothurn, Switzerland in 1993. In the following years, many exhibitions, primarily in Switzerland and Germany, presented his natural art with objects, Photography and painting. In 1997 he realized his project 10 cities . 4 blue pieces of happy nature each were donated to 10 major German cities, combined with the request to the respective cultural advisors to present the donated objects in a joint exhibition. The transnational action was ultimately not completed as some cities did not participate. The donated art was accepted.
Another highlight in his artistic work is the large-scale project Traces of Nature . In a traveling exhibition, Josef Hirthammer intends to set up 12 individual installations in German inner cities, each of which will occupy the inner cities for 3 weeks. The complex implementation is not yet scheduled. In 2001 he went public with it.
In 2003, Josef Hirthammer created 20 installations in and with nature in the vicinity of his home. He rearranged and restructured the existing chaos of nature. For days he collected flowers, which were then sorted into other places. These restructuring measures, some of which are very laborious, were and are of short duration. They are captured photographically.
Josef Josati
The enormous diversity of his art will be supplemented in 2007 by a reinterpretation of his subject of human representation. Since these works that have been created and are emerging appear so different to the viewer, he signs the new works in this direction with the pseudonym Josef Josati. Painting and drawing, printmaking and sculpture are part of this repertoire. New non-objective paintings are also signed with this pseudonym.
Current
Josef Hirthammer is considered one of the most versatile artists of our time and has created a large number of works of art in the 40 years of his artistic activity. Over the years, he has intensified the two main areas of “contemporaries” and “nature” as primary creative fields and redesigned them again and again. His current works are large installations that Josef Hirthammer documents with masterful drawings and describes them as big nature .
Important exhibitions
- 1970 Active member of the Salzburg Art Association
- 1978–80 The Tea Bags - History, Object Art; Working with different materials
- 1979 exhibitions in Munich, Nice, Frankfurt, Ulm
- 1980 founding member of the group "ZEICHEN"
- 1980 Winner of the 6th International Graphic Biennial in Frechen / Frankfurt a. M.
- 1980 Project Naturarche, A contribution as a reference to global environmental destruction.
- 1980 Munich in the head, exhibition contemporaries
- 1982 Solo exhibitions "Women on my mind"
- 1982–86 Art Basel art fair , one man show, annually
- 1982–86 exhibitions in Berlin, Munich, Nuremberg, New York, Nice,
- 1984 winner of the Eight British Print Biennale
- 1986 International Impact Art Festival, Kyoto - Japan
- 1987 Women in Large Format, Frankfurt
- 1987 Project natural chess, cycle of the destruction of nature through architecture
- 1987 Project molting, earth and grass behind glass, relics for the year 2500, Basel
- 1989 Narcissus and Gray Mouse, Düsseldorf
- 1990 Natural Pan-Sensualism, a new form of object art emerges
- 1993 solo Naturaler Pan-Sensualism, Solothurn, Switzerland
- 1994 Naturaler Pan-Sensualism again, Basel, Switzerland
- 1995 les fleurs, Galerie Albrecht Munich
- 1996 blue pieces of happy nature, Alte Saline Bad Reichenhall
- 1996 Natural chess, presentation of the model, Steininger Art Bureau, Freilassing
- 1997 Project “10 Cities”, a donation campaign in favor of a project to preserve nature
- 2000 only roses, Galerie Kämpf Basel
- 2001 Traces of Nature, traveling exhibition for 12 German cities
- 2003 20 places found, 20 times art in nature with nature
- 2004 anewway - Josef Josati, the color as poetic traces.
- 2005 Working in and with nature, documentation as video, photo and painting
- 2007 New pictures figurative, new phase of sensual figurative design
- 2011 Dance of Death, Museum Junge Kunst Frankfurt (Oder), exhibition on the 200th anniversary of Heinrich von Kleist's death
- 2011 big nature, creatively enlarged seeds of the flora
- 2011 From the end of time, Diocesan Museum Bamberg
- 2012 Cross-section, GALLERY VON & VON
- 2013 Skope Basel, Gallery VON & VON, Nuremberg
- 2013 Color and Form, RED CORRIDOR Gallery, Fulda
- 2013 ART.FAIR Cologne
- 2014 ART.FAIR Cologne
- 2014 nature and art, Hirschwirtscheuer, Würth Museum Group
Public collections
- Würth Collection , Museum Würth
- Böttingerhaus collection , Bamberg
- Kämpf Collection, Basel
Awards
- Prize winners of the 6th International Graphic Biennial in Frechen / Frankfurt a. M., 1980
- Winner of the Eight British Print Biennale, 1984
- International Impact Art Festival, Kyoto - Japan, 1986
Proof of text
- Reinhold Wurster, art critic: a shaved scrap of emotion. Südwest Presse Kulturspiegel, December 1981
- Alexandra Hänggi, art critic: Interview. Basler Zeitung , September 1994
- Norbert Jung, Cathedral Vicar: From the end of time. Dance of death in the course of history, catalog for the exhibition in the Diözesanmuseum Bamberg , 2011, pp. 28–29.
- Carla Steininger, curator: blue pieces of happy nature. Exhibition documentation Alte Saline , Bad Reichenhall 1994, pp. 9-14.
- Helmut Bachmaier: Traces of Nature. Documentation, 2001, ISBN 3-89014-186-2
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Hirthammer, Josef |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German painter, sculptor and photographer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1951 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Bad Reichenhall |