Karl Otto Götz

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Karl Otto Götz (born February 22, 1914 in Aachen ; † August 19, 2017 in Wolfenacker ), known under the stage name KO Götz , was a German painter and poet. He was a main representative of abstract art and Informel in Germany.

biography

1914–1945: Aachen, Dresden and Norway

KO Götz, May 27, 1954
KO Götz, Bagatelle II, 1962

Karl Otto Götz was born in Aachen in 1914, where from 1932 against the will of his father - he was supposed to become a textile engineer - he attended the Aachen School of Applied Arts . There he dealt with avant-garde painting. His first abstract works were created in 1933. As an abstract painter, he was banned from painting and exhibiting by the National Socialists from 1935, but he continued to paint in secret. In 1936 there was a first correspondence with Herbert Read in England, which was only continued after 1945. Also in 1936 he did his military service in the air force in Gütersloh , Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains and finally from 1940 in Dresden , where he was trained as an intelligence officer at an officers' school. His partner at the time, Anneliese Hager , who was married to the textile chemist Rudolf Brauckmeyer, lived with her children in Dresden from 1940 until the end of the Second World War . From 1941 until the end of the war in 1945, Götz was committed to Norway as an intelligence officer. Before that, through the gallery owner Heinrich Kühl in Dresden, he had made the acquaintances that made his mark with Edmund Kesting , Otto Dix , Wilhelm Lachnit and Will Grohmann . Before he was stationed in Norway, where he was already experimenting with an oscilloscope , Götz studied another semester at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden .

While he was stationed in Norway, Götz stayed in contact with the modern art scene in Germany. In 1939 he visited Willi Baumeister in Stuttgart and got to know him personally. He began an exchange of letters with him from Norway in which he exchanged information about his latest work. In the bombing raid on Dresden on February 13 and 14, 1945, his Dresden apartment was completely destroyed, which destroyed a large part of his early work. In the same year, after the end of the war, he married Anneliese Hager, with whom he already had a daughter and had a son in 1946.

1945–1959: Königsförde, Paris and Frankfurt

KO Götz: Riemu, 1968

After the war, Götz and his family lived in Königsförde near Hanover until 1950 . During this time he got to know the Bauhausler / photographer Umbo and the painters Emil Schumacher , Heinz Trökes and Hann Trier . In 1947, Major Gear, an English occupation and culture protection officer and friend of Götz, had made it possible through his girlfriend in Paris that abstract works by Götz could be seen in a Paris gallery as early as 1947 . His personal contacts in France after the war, from 1949/1950 onwards, quickly made him one of the most important mediators between the German and French art scene, because Paris was the most important center for modern and abstract painting at that time. It was there in 1948 that some Belgian, Dutch and Danish artists, including Asger Jorn , Constant , Karel Appel and Corneille , founded the artist group CoBrA . The group had become aware of Götz through the Paris exhibition, so that in 1949 he became a CoBrA member and was able to take part in the first Cobra exhibition ( Éxposition Internationale d'Art Experimental ) in Amsterdam and, until the group was dissolved in 1951, the only German CoBrA Was a member. In order to offer a forum for contemporary art and literature, he published the small magazine META (from "Metamorphose") for five years from 1948 , in which he published modern art and modern poetry, including by Paul Celan .

In 1949 he met the abstract painter Carl Buchheister in Hanover , with whom he was a close friend until Buchheister's death. In 1950 Götz moved from Königsförde to Frankfurt am Main , but stayed regularly in Paris until the late 1960s. Thanks to Götz's joint work with Bernard Schultze , Otto Greis and Heinz Kreutz, Frankfurt became one of the first and most important centers of informal post-war painting. In 1951, in a Paris exhibition, Götz first got to know works by artists such as Jackson Pollock , Willem de Kooning , Jean-Paul Riopelle , Wols and Hans Hartung .

The year 1952 was the turning point in Götz's pictorial conception; By chance, while mixing paste and paint, Götz discovered a painting technique for his son Alexander that he was able to use from then on for his informal artistic conception: he applied paint with different sized brushes to the canvases provided with paste, and then at lightning speed through a rubber squeegee to be able to fling or squeegee again. Götz was the first to use squeegees of different sizes for painting and became one of the most important international informal painters. In the same year he exhibited with Schultze, Greis and Kreutz in the "Zimmergalerie Franck" in Frankfurt under the title New Expressionists ; Through this exhibition, the four painters came together to form the legendary Quadriga , which is now considered the nucleus of German Informel. In this exhibition Götz also showed his last oil paintings, because from now on he only painted with a mixed technique of color on paste.

In 1953 Götz came into contact with Hans Arp and in the same year published the volume of poems Behaarte Herzen, Könige vor der Sintflut , which comprised old, unpublished poems by Arp, as well as new ones. With his new work Götz had growing success and now also many exhibitions in Germany and France, but also in Italy, Japan and the USA. At this time he made the acquaintance of all the important German informals, such as Gerhard Hoehme , KRH Sonderborg or Fred Thieler , with whom he also exhibited in various exhibitions. As a member of the German Association of Artists , he took part in its 7th annual exhibition in Berlin in 1957 . He was also in the two exhibitions of the same year Couleur vivante - Lebendige Farbe , which Clemens Weiler in the Museum Wiesbaden and A New Direction in Painting , which Heinz Fuchs had organized in the Kunsthalle Mannheim and which for the first time showed German Informel in its full range. represented. His increased reputation was also expressed in his participation in the large overview exhibitions on modern painting; in 1958 and 1968 he took part in the Venice Biennale and in 1959 in the documenta II in Kassel.

1959–1975: Düsseldorf

The art academy in Düsseldorf, where Karl Otto Götz taught as a professor from 1959 to 1979

In 1959 Götz moved to Düsseldorf , where he was appointed professor at the Düsseldorf Art Academy ; he taught free painting there for twenty years until his retirement in 1979 . Today he is considered the most important and most successful German art professor after the Second World War. Most of the first generation of influential German post-war artists were students of Götz, such as Kuno Gonschior , Gotthard Graubner , Sigmar Polke , Gerhard Richter , Rissa , HA Schult and Franz Erhard Walther . This was followed by three other artists of a later generation: Horst Gläsker , Friedemann Hahn and Paul Schwietzke , all of whom successfully represented very different artistic positions over the course of time. He married his former student Rissa in 1965.

In 1961 Götz, together with other progressive professors at the academy, successfully tried to secure a professorship for Joseph Beuys, who was still relatively unknown at the time, in Düsseldorf. Beuys often visited Götz in his studio at the art academy, where he dedicated several drawings to Götz. Only later, during the occupation of the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 1972 by Beuys and his students, which led to Beuys being dismissed by the Ministry of Culture without notice, did Götz increasingly distance himself from Beuys and his polarizing actions.

In the early 1960s, Götz became interested in information theory, visual perception and personality psychology and especially in experimental art such as the happenings of the Fluxus artists, so that he became friends with John Cage and Nam June Paik . According to Götz, the latter was inspired by his experimental, abstract raster film (Film Density 10: 3: 2: 2 ) to deal with the medium of television in an artistic way . Together with his wife Rissa, he intensively researched aspects of visual perception in relation to personality psychology in the following years. Like no other painter in the world, he dealt with the psychological effect of colors and shapes on the viewer of two-dimensional images. The results of this work, which also led to a visual test ( Visual-Aesthetic-Sensitivity-Test , VAST for short ), which is still used today , were published by Götz and Rissa in 1972 in their groundbreaking book Problems of Image Aesthetics - An Introduction to the Basics of Visual Thinking . Before this publication, they came into contact and exchanges with the philosopher Karl Popper and the Anglo-Saxon psychologists Daniel E. Berlyne and Hans Jürgen Eysenck .

Since 1975: Niederbreitbach-Wolfenacker

Together with Rissa, Götz moved to Niederbreitbach- Wolfenacker in the Westerwald in 1975 , where Götz also died in her studio house in 2017. The Saarland Museum in Saarbrücken organized an exhibition on Informel in 1982, at which a symposium was also held. In addition to Schultze, Thieler, Sonderborg and Hoehme, Götz also took part in this symposium. In the same year he published two volumes, Memories and Works , with which he edited his extensive autobiography. On October 3, 1990, the day of German reunification , Götz, as he himself writes in his memoirs, was so emotionally charged by the television broadcast from Berlin that he spontaneously painted the large-format painting Jonction - October 3, 1990 . The third version of this picture from 1991 was honored by Bundestag President Norbert Lammert in November 2009 on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall during a ceremony in the Paul Löbe House and was later hung in the German Bundestag in Berlin . On his 80th birthday in 1994, the Albertinum in Dresden and the Chemnitz City Art Collections each honored him with a solo exhibition.

In 1997 Götz and his wife Rissa founded the KOGötz and Rissa Foundation , which is supposed to look after and preserve the artistic legacy of the painter couple and also promote young artists. In 2004, on his 90th birthday, two solo exhibitions took place in the Suermondt Ludwig Museum in Aachen and in the Saarland Museum in Saarbrücken. There was also a “Homage to KO Götz” exhibition at the Museum Küppersmühle in Duisburg , which together with him showed a number of his best students in his class. In 2007, the second seat of the Federal President, the Villa Hammerschmidt in Bonn , was redesigned inside , alongside photographs by August Sander and Hugo Erfurth with pictures by the painter Bernard Schultze and a series of large-format works by Götz. During the opening ceremony of this new presentation, Götz was presented with the Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class for its importance for modern painting in Germany after the Second World War by the then Federal President Horst Köhler . The State Porcelain Manufactory Meißen celebrated its 300th anniversary in 2010; On this occasion, Götz was commissioned to produce a series of porcelain plates for the Porcelain Museum in Meißen, which he carried out between 2009 and 2010. Since he played a major role in the founding of the Münster Art Academy during his time as a professor in Düsseldorf , he was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2010 . Despite a serious eye condition that made him almost blind from 2004, Götz continued to paint until the early 2010s. Götz died in August 2017 at the age of 103.

plant

The early work until 1952

Götz's first works from the early 1930s were influenced by Expressionism and Surrealism , with the works of Max Ernst , Juan Gris , Wassily Kandinsky , Paul Klee and, for a short time, Willi Baumeister exerting influence on him. Above all, small-format woodcuts and so-called spray pictures were created, some of which still have figurative elements, but their structure already anticipates informal structures. Since his Dresden apartment was bombed out in 1945, many of his early works have been lost.

During the war Götz had already worked on his invoice primer , which summarized amorphous form principles and from which he repeatedly included parts in his painting. Until the early 1950s, Götz tried his hand at various artistic media, for example making air pump pictures, photograms, woodcuts, but also constructive-abstract oil paintings. In the 1950s, the forms and figures visibly dissolve; The last oil paintings and the first purely informal mixed media paintings were created in 1952 . The last abstract, informal "oil paintings" are hanging in the Saarland Museum Saarbrücken today.

Götz as the main representative of Informel

KO Götz: Giverny-Ex, 1993
KO Götz: Giverny-Ex IV, 1993

While mixing wallpaper paste for his son Axel, Götz accidentally discovered the benefits of paste and paint for his informal artistic conception, which can be produced much faster with a brush and squeegee through the paste under the water color than the viscous oil paint allows. Thus, this combination of paint on the canvas provided with paste was ideal for his goal of applying the paint to the canvas with gestures, at high speed, in order to be able to create informal structures through quick squeegee application that would never see the light of day without the quick painting process would have. Since this discovery his famous, unmistakable paintings and gouaches with squeegee paint have emerged, which made him one of the most important international representatives of Art Informel and action painting . Works were created with the all-over structure established by Pollock , but also works in which the informal formal elements, centered or diagonal, form “energetic” centers. Götz developed the latter in the late 1950s and 1960s into the so-called Schematas , which are very variable and now for a long time (until 1999) show the informal positive-negative patterns on his canvases.

From 1960 Götz worked on a raster film, which was to become one of the first experimental abstract films and which was to have a great influence on later artists of the new media, such as Paik. Götz had already been interested in abstract films before the war, but only now has he continuously worked on this project. Together with his future wife Rissa, who was still his student at the Düsseldorf Art Academy at the time, Götz painted raster images, which he later put together for the 1961 film Density 10: 3: 2: 1 . This film was intended to demonstrate the gradual, informal movement of parts of the image. After this film, however, Götz no longer dealt with such projects.

While Götz often gave his pictures no title at all in the 1950s or only gave the day the picture was created as the title, the pictures were later given mostly unusual titles that suggest imaginary names, in reality, many of them are normal Norwegian names, for example the large-format picture Födsel (today Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn ) from 1964, which translated into German means birth. Since Götz was stationed as a soldier in Norway from 1941 to 1945 during the Second World War, he got to know and love the country and its people and made some friends there, even though he was an enemy of the country. Even after the end of the war, they helped him to buy a small house in Norway in 1958 , which he visited every year from that time until 1999. Since he was fluent in Norwegian and he liked the sound of the words, these Norwegian titles were used. Later there were also titles that consist of made-up words (e.g. Riemu , Lenda or Dolbee ).

In 1958 he also created his first triptych : the left picture with the title Jupiter , the middle part UDZ (abbreviation for under this sign ) and the right one with the title Matador . In the middle part of the triptych an informally painted black and red cross shape is shown, which is reminiscent of the Christian cross symbol. The two side images show black brush strokes centered on the left on a light background and on the right it consists of the colors red, blue and a mixed shade of both shades, brownish on a light background. The titles of these side panels refer to the names of US nuclear missiles that were then stationed in the Federal Republic. This was Götz's first painting that refers to a current or historical event . Later, from 2004, a whole series of paintings on current affairs followed in his late work. Sven Beckstette described the triptych and its effect in precise words in an essay in 2002.

In the 1970s he created some works that were painted without a squeegee and only with a brush, which gave them a completely different structure. At the same time, other pictures were created, the titles of which refer directly to a current event without, however, directly taking up the subject in terms of motif, such as Moga I from 1977, which alludes to the RAF terror in Mogadishu . In the 1980s, the famous Giverny series was created over several years , in which Götz left out the color black for the first time. The brightly colored paintings that were created in this way reminded him visually of Claude Monet's garden in Giverny in terms of their color strength , so that, although he never visited the gardens, he set a monument to the color strength of the flower gardens in his mind with his Giverny paintings. On the occasion of German reunification , three informal history paintings were created in 1990/1991 with the titles Jonction I – III (translated: reconnection ).

The late work: experiments with clay, steel, wood and luminographs

KO Götz: Lezuk III, 2012

From 1999 Götz, mediated by the art dealer Edgar Quadt, created a ceramic work of impressive quality in Niels Dietrich's ceramic workshop in Cologne , which received great attention in various exhibitions in the following years.

From 2000 - here one can speak of the beginning of Götz's late work - Götz developed a series of 40 steel reliefs , mediated by Joachim Lissmann, the managing director of the KO Götz and Rissa Foundation , in cooperation with the art blacksmith Hermann Josef Colle GmbH in Saarland. The largest relief in this series, titled Marianne , is now on the outside wall of the Saarland Museum in Saarbrücken as a gift from the artist. From 2003 onwards, he created works that Götz called wooden birds . All of these works are in two parts and consist of large, informally painted and differently shaped, white-primed wooden forms that were made by a carpenter based on drawings by Götz. Each of these shapes has a small, informally painted canvas, which is connected to the wooden shape by a steel bracket.

Also in 2003, Götz created a series of informal light paintings, so-called luminographies, in collaboration with Adam C. Oellers , who, as an art historian at the Suermondt Ludwig Museum in Aachen, curated a retrospective for his 90th birthday . For this work, Götz used a flashlight instead of a brush and moved it, as if for a drawing, to form informal figures that were captured as light lithographs by a camera with a particularly long exposure time.

To mark the 60th anniversary of the bombing raids on Dresden in 2005, two more informal historical paintings were created with the titles Dresden I and Dresden II . In the same year he created two paintings that refer to the tsunami disaster in the Pacific in December 2004, and in 2008 two monumental paintings with the titles Menetekel I and Menetekel II , which by title and two each represent the towers of the World Trade Center associative black bars refer to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York. With these works Götz continued his loose series of works, which, despite the informal-abstract style of painting, deal with historical events or contemporary events.

Student (selection)

During his twenty years at the Düsseldorf Art Academy between 1959 and 1979, Karl Otto Götz taught as a simple student or master class student many of today's important artists who made a name for themselves through different artistic concepts.

Awards

Exhibitions

Fonts

  • as editor: Meta. Monthly magazine for contemporary experimental art and poetry. Jan 3, 1951, OCLC 459453030 .
  • with Rissa : Problems of Image Aesthetics - An Introduction to the Basics of Visual Thinking. Concept, Düsseldorf 1972, OCLC 1850933 .
  • KO Götz - Memories and Works (Volume Ia and Ib), Düsseldorf 1983, ISBN 3-921224-11-X .
  • KO Götz - Memories (Volumes I to IV), Aachen 1999, ISBN 3-89086-807-X .

Volumes of poetry

literature

  • KO Götz - KRH Sonderborg . Introduction by Werner Schmalenbach . Catalog for the exhibition from November 10 to December 9, 1956, Kestnergesellschaft , Hanover 1956.
  • Wieland Schmied : Presence and Eternity. Traces of the transcendent in the art of our time. Catalog for the exhibition in the Martin-Gropius-Bau , Berlin, April 7 to June 24, 1990. Edition Cantz, Stuttgart 1990, ISBN 3-89322-179-4 .
  • Karl Otto Götz in conversation: "Abstract is more beautiful". Edited by Michael Klant and Christoph Zusatz, Hatje Cantz, Stuttgart 1994, ISBN 3-89322-276-6 .
  • Homage to KO Götz. Publication on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name from February 12 to March 28, 2004 in the Küppersmühle Museum on the occasion of the 90th birthday of KO Götz. Edited by the Foundation for Art and Culture e. V. Duisburg 2004, ISBN 3-88579-118-8 .
  • Adam C. Oellers : KO Götz: A review - current work. Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum / Ludwig Forum, Aachen 2004, ISBN 3-929292-34-3 .
  • Marion Vogt: KO Götz - Impulse and Intention: Works from the Saarland Museum and from Saarbrücken private collection . Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, Worms 2004, ISBN 978-3-88462-199-8
  • Martin Schieder: In the eyes of the other. The Franco-German Art Relations 1945–1959 (with a foreword by Werner Spies and a poem by KO Götz = Passagen / Passages, Volume 12), Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-05-004148-X .
  • Nicola Carola Heuwinkel: Painting without borders. Art Informel in Germany. Kehrer, Heidelberg / Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86828-164-4 (in it chapter on KO Götz: Explosiveness of Form. Pp. 147–158, as well as numerous illustrations, dissertation University of Bonn 2008, 375 pages, illustrations, 25 cm ).
  • Oliver Kornhoff: Karl Otto Götz - In expectation of lightning-fast miracles. Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, Bielefeld 2010, ISBN 978-3-86678-391-1 .
  • Karl Otto Götz and the Quadriga. Exhibition catalog. Galerie Maulberger, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-942185-13-4 .
  • Karl Otto Götz on his 100th birthday - works on paper from seven decades. Exhibition catalog. Volksbank Kaiserslautern-Nordwestpfalz Kaiserslautern, Heidelberg 2014.
  • Christoph Zusatz: The informal history picture. Karl Otto Götz and the painted reunification of Germany. In: Uwe Fleckner (ed.): Pictures make history. Historical events in the memory of art ( Studies from the Warburg House, Vol. 13). Berlin 2014, pp. 403-415.
  • Ingrid Mössingen, Kerstin Drechsel, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz (ed.): KO Götz on the 100th birthday. Inventory and exhibition catalog. Sandstein Verlag, Dresden 2014, ISBN 978-3-95498-071-0 .
  • Ina Ströher (Ed.): Karl Otto Götz. Catalog raisonné in two volumes. With a foreword by Christoph Zusatz. Wienand Verlag, Cologne 2014. ISBN 978-3-86832-200-2 .
  • Adam C. Oellers (Ed.): Karl Otto Götz - an Öcher turned 100! Aachen is honoring its great painter on his 100th birthday on February 22nd, 2014. A documentation volume (with interviews by HA Schult and others). Alsdorf 2015. ISBN 978-3-937062-55-6 .

Web links

Commons : Karl Otto Götz  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Annette Bosetti: At the age of 103: century painter Karl Otto Götz died. Retrieved August 21, 2017 .
  2. ↑ dresdencontemporaryart.com: Karl Otto Götz on his 100th birthday. (accessed on August 20, 2014).
  3. ↑ kuenstlerbund.de: 7th exhibition Berlin / Participants: Götz, KO ( Memento from July 31, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) (accessed on August 7, 2015).
  4. ↑ Beck: "The country is rich in people who achieve outstanding results" ( Memento from September 11, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ), State Chancellery Rhineland-Palatinate , December 7, 2009.
  5. ↑ kunstakademie-muenster.de , Art Academy Münster , April 28 of 2010.
  6. ↑ KO GÖTZ retrospective on the 100th birthday ( memento from May 1, 2014 in the web archive archive.today ), accessed on May 1, 2014
  7. ↑ Notice on the exhibition , accessed on July 29, 2014.
  8. ^ Announcement on the exhibition ( Memento from September 24, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on September 22, 2014.
  9. ↑ Karl Otto Götz - Paintings and Byways: an exhibition for the 100th birthday. ( Memento of the original from March 15, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.suermondt-ludwig-museum.de archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Exhibition in the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum, Aachen, February 2 to May 4, 2014.
personal data
SURNAME Götz, Karl Otto
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Götz, KO
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German informal art painter and poet
DATE OF BIRTH February 22, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Aachen
DATE OF DEATH 19th August 2017
Place of death Wolfenacker