Otto Greis

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Otto Greis (born August 28, 1913 in Frankfurt am Main , † March 30, 2001 in Ingelheim am Rhein or Ockenheim ) was a German painter of informal art .

Life

Otto Greis originally studied mechanical engineering from 1932, but broke off this course in favor of painting. From 1934 to 1938 he took private lessons in painting and drawing from Johann Heinrich Höhl, who owned a studio at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. From 1940 to 1945 he was a medical soldier in the German Wehrmacht . Immediately after the war, in 1945, he met Ernst Wilhelm Nay , who was a central representative of abstract painting in Germany in the 1950s . This encounter and the associated exchange on questions of art was of great importance for Greis' further development. This can be seen in his works of that time as well as the examination of the works of Paul Klee and Paul Cézanne .

A key experience for his artistic path was his visit to the second CoBrA exhibition in Liège in October 1951. Greis visited this exhibition with the painter KO Götz . Greis' first informal painting "Claude" was created immediately afterwards, which was quickly followed by many other Tachist works. In December 1952 he took part in the legendary first Quadriga exhibition in Frankfurt with his own works . In addition to KO Götz , Heinz Kreutz and Bernard Schultze , he is one of the most important representatives of informal painting in Germany.

Otto Greis' work developed very independently. Although it broke with the canon of painting in the first half of the 20th century, it was not a field of impulsive gestural painting. Rather, Greis saw his work as the result of conscious design that followed its own (“new”) laws. In the mid-1950s, for example, he was looking for an independent style in dealing with evidence of “primitive art” (works of art from early history and African sculpture). From 1956/1957 Greis broke away from the informal style and turned to other painterly challenges, especially the third dimension . He tried to integrate these into his paintings by applying very impasto paint (layers of paint). During the 1960s, Greis began to understand light as a separate dimension in his painting. In dealing with “spatial bodies” on the canvas, he continued to work on the aspect of the third dimension. Triggered by trips to the Mediterranean region, his paintings increasingly acquired a luminous color mood during the 1970s, often based on ten or more almost transparent layers of paint. His regular stays in Spain from around 1983 finally changed his repertoire of shapes and colors again.

Otto Greis developed contacts to Paris as early as the early 1950s , traveled there regularly and then moved to France entirely in 1957 . In 1984 Greis moved back to Germany, to Ockenheim / Rhein, where he died in 2001 at the age of 87. In 2002 he was (posthumously) awarded the Binding Culture Prize with the other painters of the Quadriga .

Exhibitions (selection)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Old man, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German informal art painter
DATE OF BIRTH August 28, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt am Main
DATE OF DEATH March 30, 2001
Place of death Ingelheim am Rhein