Michael Croissant

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Head (1986). Giessen art trail in the Schiffenberger valley

Michael Croissant (born May 7, 1928 in Landau in the Palatinate ; † September 21, 2002 in Munich ) was a German artist and sculptor .

biography

Croissant spent his early childhood in Berlin . From 1934 to 1938 he lived in Vienna , then again in Landau, where he began an apprenticeship as a stonemason in 1942. He then attended the School of German Crafts in Kaiserslautern from 1943 to 1946. From 1946 to 1948 he took lessons at a private art school in Munich and studied from 1948 to 1953 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich with Toni Stadler .

In 1953 he married the artist Christa von Schnitzler . 1953 to 1966 he lived and worked freelance in Munich. From 1966 to 1988 (22 years) he was a professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Since 1991 he lived and worked in Haar-Gronsdorf near Munich. Croissant died on September 21, 2002 .

He was a member of the Palatinate Artists Working Group , the Palatinate Secession , the Darmstadt Secession , the New Munich Group and, from 1972, a member of the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

Works

Head (1986). Philippsruhe Castle, Hanau

“All of Michael Croissant's works, as abstract as they may seem, show people. In his body pillars, and even more so in his head, the artist succeeds in bringing the industrial material of welded steel plates to life. Feelings are not set up as an expressionist gesture, clearly visually comprehensible, but remain enclosed in the head-body, understandable only as restrained, inner, inner tension of the slightly curved sheet metal as traces of the processing on the edges and on the surface of the steel or bronze . In the reduction to the head, to that part of the human body that is commonly seen as the carrier of the mind, of reason, in the separation from the body, he tries to reformulate the human face in his contemporaneity and to take a look behind it, in the headspace, in the people. " (Quote from Scheffel Gallery, Bad Homburg)

“The early bronzes feel their way from the natural form to the amorphous, to a certain extent to the early stages of material, merely brooding existence. Since the mid-1970s he has been welding iron, lead and bronze surfaces to form massive figures or heads, increasingly abstract signs of a spirit that dominates matter. From 1980/81, Croissant worked with 3 - 4 mm thick bronze plates from which he cut out segments and welded them together to form figures and heads that were either lying or standing upright. This way of working, to which he remains true to the end of his life, gradually leads the artist to a formalization of the figure motif towards a construct. In doing so, he succeeds - and this is the great achievement of his late work - with the greatest possible reduction of the figure to a geometric hollow form, each sculpture with its own outline, to preserve a physical, existential presence. " (Quote from Ronald Appel, Galerie Appel, Frankfurt / Main )

Awards and honors

Figure (1993). On the Kolpingplatz, Cologne

Solo exhibitions (selection)

literature

  • Croissant, Michael . In: Supreme Building Authority Munich (Hrsg.): Bildwerk Bauwerk Artwork - 30 years of art and state building in Bavaria . Bruckmann, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-7654-2308-4 , p. 36, 56-57 .
  • Alexander Bastek (arr.): Of heads and bodies. Frankfurt sculpture from the Städel , Frankfurt a. M .: Städel 2006, ISBN 9783935283113 , pp. 259-261.

Web links

Standing (1975). Frankfurt am Main
Commons : Michael Croissant  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter Anselm Riedl: Michael Croissant. Prestel, Munich, 2002
  2. ↑ Ars Viva
  3. ↑ Information from the Office of the Federal President
  4. ↑ a b Michael Croissant work text. In: Galerie Jahn and Jahn. Retrieved January 3, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Croissant, Michael
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German sculptor and artist
DATE OF BIRTH May 7, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Landau in the Palatinate
DATE OF DEATH September 21, 2002
Place of death Munich