Karl Holfeld

Karl Holfeld (born May 7, 1921 in Georgswalde , Czechoslovakia , † April 11, 2009 in Bad Sulza ) was a German painter and graphic artist.

Life

A teacher recognized his talent early on, but studying art was beyond the family's financial means. Holfeld therefore completed an apprenticeship as a decorative painter. After the journeyman's examination, he was first drafted into the Reich Labor Service and then drafted into the Wehrmacht as an infantryman . In 1944 he was taken prisoner near Düren and was interned in Thorée-les-Pins in France until the summer of 1946 , where he began to process his experiences artistically. After his release from captivity, Holfeld first went to Dresden , and in 1947 to Bad Sulza in Thuringia . From 1949 to 1953 he studied at the art academies in Weimar and Dresden with Martin Domcke , Otto Herbig and Hans Grundig . During his studies in 1950 in Weimar he witnessed the formalism dispute . From 1953 he lived in Bad Sulza in the parents' house of his first wife, the daughter of the Bad Sulza painter and teacher Georg Judersleben, as a freelance artist and was considered a decadent late bourgeois in the GDR .

Study trips take him to Tunisia , Syria and Egypt in 1959 and to Novgorod , Moscow and Leningrad in 1964 . In the 1950s he was a guest artist in the Lucas house in Ahrenshoop and until the 1990s he made regular visits to Fischland / Darß , where he restored the late baroque altar and the baptistery of the Prerow seaman's church between 1985 and 1989 . Holfeld died on April 11, 2009 in Bad Sulza.

Works

Holfeld's painterly work is characterized by a wide variety of themes and styles. He painted colorful landscapes as well as abstract compositions and created woodcuts on religious subjects. In the Mauritius church in Bad Sulza he designed a mosaic of a Pietà , dedicated to “Our dead and missing: 1914–1918 and 1939–1945”.

literature

• Karl Holfeld, exhibition on the occasion of his 75th birthday. Exhibition catalog published by the Weimarer Land District Office. 1996