Ludger Gerdes

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Ludger Gerdes, Angst , 1989, City Hall, Marl

Ludger Gerdes (* 10. April 1954 in Lastrup , † 17th October 2008 at Dülmen ) was a German painter , sculptor and multimedia - artist .

Life

Klaus Bahlsen Fountain in Hanover
Walter-Sedlmayr-Platz in Munich

After graduating from high school Antonianum in Vechta, Ludger Gerdes studied from 1975 to 1982, first at the Münster Art Academy with Timm Ulrichs and Lothar Baumgarten and from 1977 at the Düsseldorf Art Academy with Gerhard Richter .

With his criticism of the link between modern art and the museum and the temporary exhibition, Gerdes emerged in exhibitions and campaigns in the early 1980s - among others together with Thomas Schütte . He advocated works of art as a means of designing public space and as a medium of public communication. The English landscape garden in particular was an important historical model for him. At that time he was considered to be the intellectual head of the artist group " Düsseldorfer Modellbauer ".

In 1982 he was represented at documenta 7 with an architecturally inspired triptych in Kassel. At this time, a series of painter pictures with pronounced allegorical-narrative elements and the Black Series , abstract paintings between monochrome and typeface, were created. He became known to a larger audience in 1987 with his land art project A Ship for Münster for the sculpture show . In 1986 he received the ars-viva- Förderpreis des Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft in the Federation of German Industry , and in 1994 the Sprengel Prize for Fine Arts, Hanover.

From 1990 to 1992 he taught at the Städelschule in Frankfurt; 1998 to 2004 was professor for painting and multimedia at the State University for Design Karlsruhe in Karlsruhe; since 2005 professor for painting at the Muthesius Kunsthochschule Kiel . Ludger Gerdes was a member of the German Association of Artists . In addition to his professorship, he lived and worked in Munich and Düsseldorf.

Ludger Gerdes worked in two ways in the fields of visual art and philosophy: his large-format painting pursued questions of surface and image reality, his sculptures explored the objectivity of things, their degree of reality and their public function. It was precisely with this ultimately political position of art that Gerdes dealt not only as a visual artist, but also very effectively as a theoretical author and lecturer. Connoisseurs considered Gerdes to be a “quiet” but important artist of his generation who, with his “visual metaphors” in public space, such as the neon sculpture ICHS (1989) in the garden of the Krefeld Museum Haus Esters, formulated a philosophical-aesthetic reflection on existence.

In recent years he has devoted himself increasingly to public sculpture and the aesthetic examination of public space, documenting 140 plaza designs in Germany in a photo series around 1996 . A new group of conceptual diptychs combined literary and philosophical texts with photography . His last major public three-dimensional project was created in Munich in 2003 with the design of Walter-Sedlmayr-Platz .

Ludger Gerdes was killed in a car accident on October 17th, 2008. His estate is the archive for artists discounts the Arts Fund Foundation in Pulheim ( Brauweiler Abbey supervised). The artist's written estate is in the German Art Archive in Nuremberg.

Works (selection)

literature

  • Ludger Gerdes. Painter Pictures. Les Images du Peintre. Painter's Pictures, exhibition cat. Maison de la Culture et de la Communication de Saint-Etienne, 1988.
  • Ludger Gerdes: Relation . Cologne 1992, ISBN 3-88375-164-2
  • Ludger Gerdes. Exhibition cat. Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Musée d'Art Moderne, Saint-Etienne. Ostfildern 1994, ISBN 3-89322-673-7 .
  • Ludger Gerdes: space - space . In: Hans Wielens (Ed.): Project space design. A plea for more humanity in public spaces . Münster 1996, ISBN 3-8157-1475-3 , pp. 21–125 (article with 60 photos by the artist)
  • Dietmar Elger: Ludger Gerdes (= contemporary art from Lower Saxony , volume 55). Hannover 2000, ISBN 978-3-88746-418-9
  • Sabine Maria Schmidt. In: Tactics of Ego / Tactics of Ego , exhib.-cat. Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg. Bielefeld 2003, ISBN 3-936646-12-0 , p. 45 f. (to the photo diptych floor of togetherness (we - bonds) )
  • Thomas Schütte , Julian Heynen (Eds.): Ludger Gerdes. Paralipomena . Cologne 2010, ISBN 978-3-86560-767-6
  • Sylvia Martin, Anette Hüsch (eds.): Ludger Gerdes: From fear to want . Exhibition cat. Art museums Krefeld / Museum Haus Lange, Kunsthalle zu Kiel. Vienna 2016, ISBN 978-3-903131-51-4

Web links

Commons : Ludger Gerdes  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Full members of the German Association of Artists since it was founded in 1903 / Gerdes, Ludger . ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The 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. kuenstlerbund.de; Retrieved December 3, 2015 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.kuenstlerbund.de
  2. ↑ Helmut Knocke , Hugo Thielen : Trammplatz , in: Hannover Art and Culture Lexicon , p. 206
personal data
SURNAME Gerdes, Ludger
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter, sculptor and multimedia artist
DATE OF BIRTH April 10, 1954
PLACE OF BIRTH Lastrup
DATE OF DEATH October 17, 2008
Place of death Dülmen