Raimund Girke

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Raimund Girke (born October 28, 1930 in Heinzendorf (Jasienica), Lower Silesia , † June 12, 2002 in Cologne ) was a German painter of art after 1945.

life and work

His father was the art teacher Arthur Girke, who had studied with Otto Mueller in Dresden. After fleeing Lower Silesia, the family settled in the Osnabrück region. Raimund Girke graduated from high school in Quakenbrück in 1951 and then studied until 1952 at the Werkkunstschule Hannover , where he later worked as a lecturer from 1966 to 1971, and then until 1956 at the State Art Academy in Düsseldorf with Georg Meistermann. Since 1971 he has taught as a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts . In 1977 he took part in documenta VI in Kassel . In the early 1980s he moved into a studio in Cologne, which his daughter and estate administrator Madeleine Girke did not liquidate until 2017.

Girkes retrospectives: 1995–96 in the Sprengel Museum Hanover, Von der Heydt Museum ( Wuppertal ), Saarland Museum Saarbrücken and the Kunsthalle Nürnberg . His last exhibitions were in the Cottbus Art Collection in 2000 and in the Heidenheim Art Museum in 2001 .

In 1954 Girke painted his first non-representational picture. At first he was influenced by the gestural-rhythmic abstraction of the Informel , then from the mid-1950s he developed an almost monochrome visual language reduced to a few shades of color ; dealing primarily with the color white. Therefore he is to be assigned as a representative of an analytical painting that does not want to depict anything. Girke always emphasized that his painting was “fundamental”, his pictures the result of an “autonomous painting process”.

Grave in the Melaten cemetery

In search of order, Girke analyzed color layering, color movement and structure by letting his painting result entirely from the technique and the process. Girke emphasized that it was not the liberated gesture that interested him, but the disciplined severity and the factual statement. "White is emptiness, immateriality, calm and silence," Girke once wrote about his painting. The art magazine Art wrote that Girke was fascinated by "[t] he overabundance in the 'emptiness', [...] the point where, in the greatest reduction, with plain white, he achieved the greatest range of variation". He builds up his pictures line by line, whereby "every square centimeter is worked through exactly" and thus reminds of Willem de Kooning . Unlike the artists of the ZERO group ( Otto Piene , Günther Uecker and Heinz Mack ), Girke has always known for the tradition of panel painting.

His grave is in the Melaten cemetery in Cologne (hall 22 (V) no.74b),

student

Students of Girkes are u. a. Hermann Pitz , Eberhard Bosslet , Matthias Kunkler , Thomas Kiesewetter , Irene Thomet and Günther Reger .

Awards

Works in museums

plant

  • The colors of the earth , 1956, oil on canvas, 80 × 100 cm, Fahnemann, Berlin
  • unlimited , 1991 Oil on canvas, 140 × 230 cm, Deutsche Bundesbank art collection , Frankfurt am Main
  • Light / moves , 1996, oil on canvas, Fahnemann, Berlin

literature

  • Wieland Schmied : Documents of Our Time IX: Raimund Girke –Arbeiten (1953–1989), Galerie Dorothea van der Koelen Verlag, Mainz 1989, ISBN 3-926663-09-X
  • Gottfried Boehm: White light . About Raimund Girke, in: Artists. Critical Lexicon of Contemporary Art, edition 9/1990
  • Wieland Schmied : Presence and Eternity. Traces of the transcendent in the art of our time , Martin-Gropius-Bau , Berlin April 7 to June 24, 1990, Edition Cantz, Stuttgart 1990; ISBN 3-89322-179-4
  • Wulf Herzogenrath and Dorothea van der Koelen: Documents of Our Time XXXIII: Panta Rhei , Chorus-Verlag, Mainz 2005, ISBN 3-926663-33-2

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Lisa Zeitz: The white giant . In: Weltkunst . No. 141 (April 2018). Zeitverlag Gerd Bucerius, Hamburg, p. 51/55 .
  2. ^ Ernst Busche: Berlin: Raimund Girke. The energies of the color white . In: Art . The art magazine. Gruner + Jahr , Hamburg May 1986, p. 112 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Girke, Raimund
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter
DATE OF BIRTH October 28, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Heinzendorf (Jasienica), Lower Silesia
DATE OF DEATH June 12, 2002
Place of death Cologne