Kurt Benning

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Kurt Benning (born January 31, 1945 in Pleystein / Upper Palatinate; † March 24, 2017 in Munich ) was a German draftsman, photographer and painter.

Life

Kurt Benning completed an apprenticeship in watchmaking in Stuttgart from 1961 to 1964. From 1965 to 1969 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich , among others with Karl Fred Dahmen . 1969/1970 he was on a DAAD scholarship at the Central School of Art London , 1972/1973 with a British Council Scholarship at the Royal College of Art London. From 1971 to 1975 Benning worked as a graphic designer and photographer at the Goethe-Institut London. He lived and worked in Munich and Gunderding / Lower Bavaria . On March 24, 2017, he died in Munich after a long illness.

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Benning used a wide variety of media. Photography and film served him to record the course of time and traces that time has created. Based on this, process-based painting emerged in the 1970s and 80s, e. B. circles drawn on the canvas lying on the floor, and sculptural installations, e.g. B. from ropes. Basic geometric shapes such as circles and squares also led to stone sculptures. In addition to photos of objects found by chance, reminiscent of sculptures or interventions in nature in the sense of Land Art , portraits of well-known people such as Michael Hamburger , friends and casual acquaintances were taken. The drawings from the 1960s to 1980s show dreamlike and nightmarish landscapes and situations. After that, mainly processual works (“Belgrade drawings”) were created in this medium as well. Benning was fascinated by the traces that people leave behind, be it things that they have worked on or the life that is documented in legacies ("Legacy", among others exhibited in the Kolumba Museum in Cologne in 2009 and " Burgtreswitzmensch " exhibited there in 2016/17) .

In 1983 Kurt Benning was represented at the group exhibition Aktuell 83 in Munich.

From the mid-1990s Benning started (initially with Hermann Kleinknecht ) the "video portraits" project. The concept consisted of portraying people from all social classes, different professional groups and of all ages on film, in order to obtain the most complex picture of our society on the basis of individuals who each express themselves in the form of a one-hour monologue. The steadily growing collection of these portraits saw itself as work in progress . A selection was also exhibited in Kolumba in 2016/17. In the more than 100 completed portraits you can find, among others: Walter Kempowski , Vlado Kristl , Martin Sperr , Gottfried Knapp , Hartmut Riederer , Sigi Zimmigart , Rüdiger Schöttle or Tian Harlan.

Since 2011, a further, also ongoing video project entitled “Considerations” has been in progress. It is a series of different sequences of everyday situations or observations of nature, each around ten minutes long, mostly recorded with an immobile camera.

Munich-based communication designer Wolfgang Seiss took over the collaboration on Kurt Benning's video projects, computer simulations and animations, as well as the digital processing and archiving of older works .

While still an academy student, in 1967, Benning initiated a poster campaign entitled “Save Munich's Facades”, which later, thanks to the commitment of young art history students at Munich's Ludwig Maximilians University, led to the City of Munich's Facade Prize and a deeper interest in cultural heritage. “Kurt Benning was one of the first to feel the loss that every demolition, every clearcut caused. Losses became his profession. [...] He wanted to tear off the mask of necessity, today mostly called 'lack of alternatives', from the so-called progress and became a lifelong tracer: art as anthropology and self-exploration, as the art historian Günter Metken put it. ”In 2017, the publication Stadien des Decay .

On October 17, 2018, the Kurt Benning Foundation completed the artist's last and largest work, the sculpture Kubus , which was erected at 1,800 m above the Schwarzwassertal in Tyrol at the foot of the Bockkar and near the Jubiläumsweg .

Awards

  • 1980: Funding by the Johannes Eichner and Gabriele Münter Foundation
  • 1982: Prize of the City of Munich for painting
  • 1984: State sponsorship award in the field of fine arts, Munich
  • 1986: Scholarship stay at the Künstlerhaus Villa Waldberta , Feldafing
  • 1994: Grant from the Budapest Galeria, Budapest.

Works in public collections

literature

  • Kurt Benning. Material for poetry. Texts: Sabine Fehlemann. From the Heydt Museum, Wuppertal 1986.
  • Kurt Benning. Painting - sculpture - photography - drawing. Photographs by Silke Eberspächer, Heinz Herzer, Wolfgang Mayer. Texts: Rüdiger Joppien, Gottfried Knapp , Herbert Schneidler, Andreas Strobl. Städtische Galerie, Regensburg 1993, ISBN 3-925753-34-6 .
  • Kurt Benning. natura morta. Essay by Andreas Strobl. Vízivárosi Gáleria, Budapest 1995.
  • Kurt Benning. Belgrade drawings. With an essay by Jana Konschak. Galerie Heinz Herzer, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-9803962-2-3 .
  • Gottfried Knapp, Andreas Strobl, Kurt Benning: Kurt Benning, news from yesterday. Klinger, Passau 2004, ISBN 3-932949-30-7 .
  • German village in winter. Stutz, Passau 2006, ISBN 3-88849-118-5 .
  • Art on campus. Klinger, Passau 2008, ISBN 978-3-932949-77-7 .
  • Peter Pinnau (Ed.): Kurt Benning. Yesterday's news. 2 volumes. Rathausgalerie Munich, Munich 2008.
  • Kurt Benning. Burgtreswitzmensch. Rathausgalerie Munich, Munich 2008.
  • Kurt Benning. Legacy. A German legacy. Kolumba Werkbuch 32. Kunstmuseum Kolumba, Cologne 2009. ISBN 978-3-9813182-0-3 .
  • Kurt Benning. Stages of decay. Munich 1967–69. London 1969-72. Munich 2017 (Volume 3 on: Yesterday's News ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Death on trauer.sueddeutsche.de of March 28, 2017. Accessed April 5 2017th
  2. ^ Page to the exhibition, Kolumba. Retrieved October 10, 2017 .
  3. ^ Obituary by Peter B. Steiner in: Christ in der Gegenwart vol. 69, 14 (2017).
personal data
SURNAME Benning, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German draftsman, photographer and painter
DATE OF BIRTH January 31, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH Pleystein
DATE OF DEATH March 24, 2017
Place of death Munich